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http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/241054802/_/oupbloghistory/#respondFri, 09 Dec 2016 12:30:29 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=126419An unexpected figure lurks in the pages of Wonder Woman (no. 48) from 1951 — the 17th-century French Classicist Anne Dacier. She's there as part of the 'Wonder Women of History' feature which promoted historical figures as positive role models for its readership. Her inspirational story tells of her success in overcoming gender prejudice to become a respected translator of Classical texts.

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An unexpected figure lurks in the pages of Wonder Woman (no. 48) from 1951 — the 17th century French Classicist Anne Dacier. She’s there as part of the “Wonder Women of History” feature which promoted historical figures as positive role models for its readership. Her inspirational story tells of her success in overcoming gender prejudice to become a respected translator of Classical texts. Three hundred years after the publication of Dacier’s final translation, Homer’s Odyssey (1716), we too can learn from this figure. Looking back across her career, I can reveal ten tips for women today.

1. Be proactive
The keystone to Dacier’s success was the level of education she gained from her father, the scholar Tanneguy Le Fèvre. She was apparently proactive about securing this opportunity, secretly listening to her brother’s lessons and one day revealing how much she had learnt. This prompted her father to offer her the same education as her brothers.

2.Take risks
After Dacier’s father died unexpectedly, she made the bold decision to travel the 200-mile journey from Saumur to Paris and try to establish a career there. Later in her career, she took another risk when she translated the vulgar comedy of Aristophanes which was completely out of fashion. This daring undertaking is now recognized as a major part of her legacy to Classics.

3. Learn from mistakes
In two letters from 1681, Dacier begs her father’s friend, Daniel Huet, to intervene for her at Court so that she would get paid for the work which they had commissioned, as otherwise she was going to be left out of pocket. In fact, she never managed to resolve this issue, and in another letter, from later in that year, she notes that in future she would be more cautious! We all make mistakes, but it’s learning from them which can be our making.

4. Find your voice
Dacier was working in the shadow of her father who had been a famous scholar, but this didn’t stop her from carving her own path. In part she managed to do this by making her own voice heard — by respectfully disagreeing with some of his views in print. She was also ready to challenge other male scholars of her day, demonstrating that she was equal to them.

5. Make female solidarity work for you
Women were the cultural arbiters of Dacier’s day and could confirm the success of a publication, Dacier therefore wooed the female readership in her first French translation. In the preface, she says she hopes that her translation will delight women (and of course it’s no coincidence that one of her chosen authors to translate was Sappho the famous ancient Greek female poet).

6. Transgress smart
Achieving your goals despite society’s gender boundaries can mean playing the boundary — enforcers at their own game. Dacier offers a textbook example of this when she negotiates her transgression into the exclusively male domain of the King’s Library to consult a manuscript. She gets away with her invasion into male territory by describing her reluctance and timidity in going there. This reassuring assertion of modesty allays any alarm felt at the incursion.

7. Network
A swift perusal of Dacier’s book dedications shows a skilled operator at work. These are not sentimental choices of parents and partners, but rather key figures whose support Dacier needed. She ensures that she’s noticed by the right people through these dedications. They are the equivalent of modern networking.

8. Pick a supportive partner
One of the mistakes which Dacier learnt from was her first marriage (to a printer, Jean Lesnier, in the Loire region). The marriage broke down after the death of their first child. Her second marriage, however, was to last until her own death. Her second husband André Dacier had studied with her father and was also a scholar. He respected her intelligence, collaborating with her on some publications, and supported her career.

9. Work-life balance
It seems impossible, from the stack of publications which Dacier produced, to believe that she could have also managed to have a life outside her books, but that’s exactly what the evidence suggests. Her contemporaries write that she was a wonderful conversationalist and praise her ability to socialise, setting the books aside to talk about hairstyles. Meanwhile her devotion to her family life is vividly recorded through her heartfelt words of grief after the death of her daughter.

10. Attract trumpet blowers
Self-publicity is a treacherous enterprise (and perhaps even more so now than in Dacier’s day). The elegant solution to the trumpet-blowing dilemma is to find someone else to do it for you. Dacier’s friend, who also happened to be a champion of women, Gilles Ménage did that brilliantly for her in his History of Women Philosophers.

The 21st century can seem a world apart from the 17th century: we’ve made significant gender progress over the intervening centuries. Yet gender inequality continues to be an issue. Looking back to the success of Dacier, and other historical female figures, at overcoming barriers is not only uplifting, but can also prove surprisingly instructive. It seems that we need our “Wonder Women of History” as much in 2016 as they did in 1951.

Featured image credit: Minerva and the Nine Muses. Painting by Hendrick van Balen the Elder. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/241054802/_/oupbloghistory/feed/0History,*Featured,André Dacier,Gilles Ménage,Homer,wonder woman,aristophanes,France,Arts & Humanities,Tanneguy Le Fèvre,Women Classical Scholars,Books,Europe,17th century,gender inequality,Rosie Wyles,Anne Dacier,odyssey,Unsealing the Fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly,Sappho,Classicist,gender prejudice,Wonder Women of History,Classics & Archaeology,genderAn unexpected figure lurks in the pages of Wonder Woman (no. 48) from 1951 — the 17th century French Classicist Anne Dacier. She's there as part of the “Wonder Women of History” feature which promoted historical figures as positive role models for its readership. Her inspirational story tells of her success in overcoming gender prejudice to become a respected translator of Classical texts. Three hundred years after the publication of Dacier's final translation, Homer's Odyssey (1716), we too can learn from this figure. Looking back across her career, I can reveal ten tips for women today.
1. Be proactive
The keystone to Dacier's success was the level of education she gained from her father, the scholar Tanneguy Le Fèvre. She was apparently proactive about securing this opportunity, secretly listening to her brother's lessons and one day revealing how much she had learnt. This prompted her father to offer her the same education as her brothers.
2. Take risks
After Dacier's father died unexpectedly, she made the bold decision to travel the 200-mile journey from Saumur to Paris and try to establish a career there. Later in her career, she took another risk when she translated the vulgar comedy of Aristophanes which was completely out of fashion. This daring undertaking is now recognized as a major part of her legacy to Classics.
3. Learn from mistakes
In two letters from 1681, Dacier begs her father's friend, Daniel Huet, to intervene for her at Court so that she would get paid for the work which they had commissioned, as otherwise she was going to be left out of pocket. In fact, she never managed to resolve this issue, and in another letter, from later in that year, she notes that in future she would be more cautious! We all make mistakes, but it's learning from them which can be our making. Anne Le Fèvre, épouse Dacier by Pierre Bonnefont. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
4. Find your voice
Dacier was working in the shadow of her father who had been a famous scholar, but this didn't stop her from carving her own path. In part she managed to do this by making her own voice heard — by respectfully disagreeing with some of his views in print. She was also ready to challenge other male scholars of her day, demonstrating that she was equal to them.
5. Make female solidarity work for you
Women were the cultural arbiters of Dacier's day and could confirm the success of a publication, Dacier therefore wooed the female readership in her first French translation. In the preface, she says she hopes that her translation will delight women (and of course it's no coincidence that one of her chosen authors to translate was Sappho the famous ancient Greek female poet).
6. Transgress smart
Achieving your goals despite society's gender boundaries can mean playing the boundary — enforcers at their own game. Dacier offers a textbook example of this when she negotiates her transgression into the exclusively male domain of the King's Library to consult a manuscript. She gets away with her invasion into male territory by describing her reluctance and timidity in going there. This reassuring assertion of modesty allays any alarm felt at the incursion.
7. Network
A swift perusal of Dacier's book dedications shows a skilled operator at work. These are not sentimental choices of parents and partners, but rather key figures whose support Dacier needed. She ensures that she’s noticed by the right people through these dedications. They are the equivalent of modern networking.
8. Pick a supportive partner
One of the mistakes which Dacier learnt from was her first marriage (to a printer, Jean Lesnier, in the Loire region). The marriage broke down after the death of their first child. Her second marriage, however, was to last until her own death. Her second husband André Dacier had studied with her father and was also a scholar. He respected her ... An unexpected figure lurks in the pages of Wonder Woman (no. 48) from 1951 — the 17th century French Classicist Anne Dacier. She's there as part of the “Wonder Women of History” feature which promoted historical figures as ... http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/241054802/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/12/oral-history-annual-meeting-recap/Oral History Annual Meeting: an enriching experiencehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/hB97FvYYeS4/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/241008554/_/oupbloghistory/#respondFri, 09 Dec 2016 10:30:48 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=126608This past October the Oral History Association conducted the Fiftieth Annual Meeting in Long Beach, California. The theme of the annual meeting was OHA@50: Traditions, Transitions and Technologies from the Field.

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Before we give up on 2016, we’re taking one last look back at one of our favorite events from the year – the OHA Annual Meeting. We’ve already talked about why oral historians love the connections they make at the Annual Meeting, and how it serves as a yearly dose of sanity. Today we bring you some final reflections from Mark Garcia, who served as our local guide during the meeting and managed social media throughout the conference. Enjoy his summary, and make sure to get your proposal for #OHA2017 in soon. The conference, entitled “Engaging Audiences: Oral History and the Public” will be held in Minneapolis, and the deadline for submissions is 31 January. We look forward to seeing you there.

This past October the Oral History Association conducted the Fiftieth Annual Meeting in Long Beach, California. The theme of the annual meeting was OHA@50: Traditions, Transitions and Technologies from the Field. Many of my fellow classmates and I attended the Annual Meeting. I had a unique role as the Oral History Review Editorial Assistant roaming the floor, attending panel discussions, providing updates via the Oral History Reviews socialmediaaccounts, and writing on the Oxford University Press’s blog about local Long Beach insights for the Annual Meeting. In addition, I attended the Oral History Review editorial meeting and took meeting notes. The meeting was an enriching experience as I was able to sit among the editorial staff while they strategized on topics for future issues, book and peer review updates, article submissions, and upcoming projects.

This enriching experience provided me affirmation on why I am studying to be an oral historian. It was exciting to hear and discuss many of the same practice’s I have learned at Cal State Fullerton and beneficial too learn new innovative ways to conduct oral histories. For more insight on the Oral History Association Annual Meeting listen to Outspoken: A COPH Podcast Episode Five and hear from other conference participant’s experiences.

Let us know what you loved about #OHA2016, or what you’re looking forward to about #OHA2017 in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/241008554/_/oupbloghistory/feed/0*Featured,Oral History Annual Meeting,Oral History Review,Mark T. Garcia,Journals,graduate school,academia,Fullerton,california,Long Beach,oral history association,academics,Oral History,Oral History Association Annual Meeting,oral history,California State UniversityBefore we give up on 2016, we’re taking one last look back at one of our favorite events from the year – the OHA Annual Meeting. We’ve already talked about why oral historians love the connections they make at the Annual Meeting, and how it serves as a yearly dose of sanity. Today we bring you some final reflections from Mark Garcia, who served as our local guide during the meeting and managed social media throughout the conference. Enjoy his summary, and make sure to get your proposal for #OHA2017 in soon. The conference, entitled “Engaging Audiences: Oral History and the Public” will be held in Minneapolis, and the deadline for submissions is 31 January. We look forward to seeing you there.
This past October the Oral History Association conducted the Fiftieth Annual Meeting in Long Beach, California. The theme of the annual meeting was OHA@50: Traditions, Transitions and Technologies from the Field. Many of my fellow classmates and I attended the Annual Meeting. I had a unique role as the Oral History Review Editorial Assistant roaming the floor, attending panel discussions, providing updates via the Oral History Reviews social media accounts, and writing on the Oxford University Press’s blog about local Long Beach insights for the Annual Meeting. In addition, I attended the Oral History Review editorial meeting and took meeting notes. The meeting was an enriching experience as I was able to sit among the editorial staff while they strategized on topics for future issues, book and peer review updates, article submissions, and upcoming projects.
The heart of the Annual Meeting was the many panel discussions. One of the of panels I attended was Centennial Voices: Using Oral history to Document Traditions and Guide Transitions where National Park Service Staff Historian Lu Ann Jones discussed the various Oral History projects of the National Park Service. Another powerful panel was Activist Women Within: Re-thinking Red, Yellow, Brown and Black Power through Oral History. Special guest and commentator of the Warrior Women’s Film Project Madonna Thunder Hawk provided oral history accounts of the Standing Rock protest in North Dakota. Our very own Dr. Natalie Fousekis, Director of the Center for Oral and Public History, was a speaker for the Oral History, Now (and Tomorrow) plenary session. Dr. Fousekis provided insights on the current status of oral history, plus ideas, opinions, and discussion for future oral history projects. These are just a few highlights of the many engaging panels from fellow oral historians.
This enriching experience provided me affirmation on why I am studying to be an oral historian. It was exciting to hear and discuss many of the same practice’s I have learned at Cal State Fullerton and beneficial too learn new innovative ways to conduct oral histories. For more insight on the Oral History Association Annual Meeting listen to Outspoken: A COPH Podcast Episode Five and hear from other conference participant’s experiences.
Let us know what you loved about #OHA2016, or what you’re looking forward to about #OHA2017 in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.
Featured image courtesy of the Oral History Association.
The post Oral History Annual Meeting: an enriching experience appeared first on OUPblog. Before we give up on 2016, we’re taking one last look back at one of our favorite events from the year – the OHA Annual Meeting. We’ve already talked about why oral historians love the connections they make at the Annual ... http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/241008554/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/12/marking-cassavetes-birthday-film/Marking Cassavetes’ birthday with a discussion on male discourse in his filmshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/fXH04IoCEyc/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/240985192/_/oupbloghistory/#respondFri, 09 Dec 2016 09:30:22 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=126454On the cusp of what would have been John Cassavetes' eighty-seventh birthday, it is not only possible to pause and imagine the work the man could have made throughout his sixties and seventies — think, for a moment, on Cassavetes as being alive and well, writing and directing films in a post-9/11 America — but also we can turn to his works for a lens onto a version of the world that, given the recent state of affairs on this planet, we could sorely use.

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On the cusp of what would have been John Cassavetes‘ eighty-seventh birthday, it is not only possible to pause and imagine the work the man could have made throughout his sixties and seventies — think, for a moment, on Cassavetes as being alive and well, writing and directing films in a post-9/11 America — but also we can turn to his works for a lens onto a version of the world that, given the recent state of affairs on this planet, we could sorely use.

It is true that Cassavetes’ films present us with a complicated world, but it is a space in which myriad disconnections and complexities among characters lead them to not only struggle, fight, and argue but also to stop and deeply listen to each other and to themselves. Even if the characters that fill Cassavetes’ films are fraught with complications — even if they are prone to bad turns, and they frustrate each other (and themselves) as they grope for authority and control across chasms of unresolved behaviors and emotional double-backs — at the core of the characters Cassavetes constructed we also find depictions of a recurrent urge for understanding, a fumbling for compassion and empathy.

If one sets to one side, for a moment, the monumental attention that we must pay to Gena Rowlands’ career spent portraying powerful, tragic, fierce, and sometimes broken women throughout Cassavetes’ films — and any focus on Rowlands should not mistake Lelia Goldoni and other women who’ve portrayed the writer-director’s characters as being unimportant — in relation to these struggles and urges one can explore the films by giving attention to how men treat and talk to each other across the works. We can posit, in particular, as new kinds of presidents set new sorts of precedents for what men (in particular) and their friends can do — what they can say out loud without accountability — that in Cassavetes’ films he did many things but one thing he did many times throughout the twelve that he directed was to put his lens on a problematic, multivalent, and expansive male discourse. And from this we might learn a few things.

We find examples of the discourse in Husbands. The film is rich, despite its fractured and often deeply problematic bar-table and hotel-room aggressions — and often these are aggressions of men upon women, or the young upon the old, as we should note — with graveyard conversations about truth and lies, with crowded bathroom-stall fugues about the nature of mortality and the terror of aloneness, and with front-yard wind-ups on the topics of power in families and the authority we confer to our bosses and our paymasters and our spouses. All of this is absorbed and tolerated and finally erupts across the days we spend, through Cassavetes’ creation, in these men’s lives. They are, of course, men, these individuals. We cannot overlook their humanity, their empathetic cores pushing throughout the film’s imposed barriers, sharing weaknesses with one another — and sometimes with women, by film’s end — across time and two continents.

John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands from the television program Johnny Staccato. Image: NBC, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

We can look also to the discourse between characters in Love Streams. In an early scene at a cabaret, a man dressed as a woman asks Robert Harmon (Cassavetes) if he is gay. The exchange is at once marked by both confidence and tremulousness. The asker is steady and perhaps gentle, allowing Robert to visibly grapple with the question, his face rippling with nervous energy, with surprise, and with the shy state of his apparent and immediate unsureness of what to say. No one is angry. No lines are drawn. No one is accused of being an ‘other’.

And we see this complicated world of men communicating about what they similarly do not yet know in the ramped-up days and nights of Shadows. Tony and friends race the city’s sidewalks, crying “forward!” to each other, play-fighting, and scooping on young women in diners. But then, momentarily surrounded by less familiar things in a museum sculpture garden, by a world of perceptions and depictions that strike some of them as, yes, too feminine or too elite (as Tom says), others among the men of Shadows resist these conclusions. We are struck when Dennis expresses his negative capabilities, shouting “I don’t know everything!” at Tom. For a moment, for the two, it is a pressing argument — the worth of looking at a modern sculpture, the value of acknowledging expressions not immediately decipherable, not intuitively recognized, and not categorizable by history and lessons handed down from the past.

Ray Carney, writing about Cassavetes’ work, ties something like that state of mind — ‘I don’t know everything’ — to larger themes, to Emersonian concepts of a fluid and volatile world in which what we think and feel is always in motion. To proclaim “I don’t know everything” is to invite disagreement but to demand recognition, to say, perhaps, along with Emerson (and Carney) that reality and knowledge are snapshots of experiences. In another vein, to say ‘I don’t know everything‘ is to court what Ilana Simons refers to as a wiser willingness for vulnerability — a willingness that is accessed by the “high modality” of kindness, as she puts it — and it is an argument for compassion and more thoughtfulness in the midst of moments otherwise suffused with confrontation.

In a time when we could be overwhelmed by confrontations, and when we are startled perhaps by choruses claiming disenfranchisement as a right to new authority — the authority to shun, ridicule, or squash fluidity and ambiguity — we come upon a fine way to mark Cassavetes’ birthday. We can turn to his films for a difficult, empathetic and multivalent look at how we — especially we men of this world — speak to and treat each other, and it is even finer to do so when we consider our words and deeds towards women. Pick one of the films and put it on, for these are the gifts Cassavetes has given us for our times.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/240985192/_/oupbloghistory/feed/0film,*Featured,cassavetes,male discourse,aloneness,gina rowlands,Arts & Humanities,cinema,Biography,love streams,on this day,john cassavetes,James O’Brien,Online products,director,on this date,TV & Film,ray carneyOn the cusp of what would have been John Cassavetes' eighty-seventh birthday, it is not only possible to pause and imagine the work the man could have made throughout his sixties and seventies — think, for a moment, on Cassavetes as being alive and well, writing and directing films in a post-9/11 America — but also we can turn to his works for a lens onto a version of the world that, given the recent state of affairs on this planet, we could sorely use.
It is true that Cassavetes’ films present us with a complicated world, but it is a space in which myriad disconnections and complexities among characters lead them to not only struggle, fight, and argue but also to stop and deeply listen to each other and to themselves. Even if the characters that fill Cassavetes’ films are fraught with complications — even if they are prone to bad turns, and they frustrate each other (and themselves) as they grope for authority and control across chasms of unresolved behaviors and emotional double-backs — at the core of the characters Cassavetes constructed we also find depictions of a recurrent urge for understanding, a fumbling for compassion and empathy.
If one sets to one side, for a moment, the monumental attention that we must pay to Gena Rowlands’ career spent portraying powerful, tragic, fierce, and sometimes broken women throughout Cassavetes’ films — and any focus on Rowlands should not mistake Lelia Goldoni and other women who’ve portrayed the writer-director’s characters as being unimportant — in relation to these struggles and urges one can explore the films by giving attention to how men treat and talk to each other across the works. We can posit, in particular, as new kinds of presidents set new sorts of precedents for what men (in particular) and their friends can do — what they can say out loud without accountability — that in Cassavetes’ films he did many things but one thing he did many times throughout the twelve that he directed was to put his lens on a problematic, multivalent, and expansive male discourse. And from this we might learn a few things.
We find examples of the discourse in Husbands. The film is rich, despite its fractured and often deeply problematic bar-table and hotel-room aggressions — and often these are aggressions of men upon women, or the young upon the old, as we should note — with graveyard conversations about truth and lies, with crowded bathroom-stall fugues about the nature of mortality and the terror of aloneness, and with front-yard wind-ups on the topics of power in families and the authority we confer to our bosses and our paymasters and our spouses. All of this is absorbed and tolerated and finally erupts across the days we spend, through Cassavetes’ creation, in these men’s lives. They are, of course, men, these individuals. We cannot overlook their humanity, their empathetic cores pushing throughout the film’s imposed barriers, sharing weaknesses with one another — and sometimes with women, by film’s end — across time and two continents. John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands from the television program Johnny Staccato. Image: NBC, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
We can look also to the discourse between characters in Love Streams. In an early scene at a cabaret, a man dressed as a woman asks Robert Harmon (Cassavetes) if he is gay. The exchange is at once marked by both confidence and tremulousness. The asker is steady and perhaps gentle, allowing Robert to visibly grapple with the question, his face rippling with nervous energy, with surprise, and with the shy state of his apparent and immediate unsureness of what to say. No one is angry. No lines are drawn. No one is accused of being an 'other'.
And we see this complicated world of men communicating about what they ... On the cusp of what would have been John Cassavetes' eighty-seventh birthday, it is not only possible to pause and imagine the work the man could have made throughout his sixties and seventies — think, for a moment, on Cassavetes as ... http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/240985192/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/12/cuba-intervention-africa-cold-war/The little known history of Cuba’s intervention in Africa during the Cold Warhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/zrWX1DXIvWg/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/240485372/_/oupbloghistory/#commentsThu, 08 Dec 2016 11:30:44 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=126448When Nelson Mandela visited Havana in 1991, he declared: "We come here with a sense of the great debt that is owed the people of Cuba. What other country can point to a record of greater selflessness than Cuba has displayed in its relations to Africa?" In all the reflections upon the death of Fidel Castro, his contribution to Africa has been neglected

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When Nelson Mandela visited Havana in 1991, he declared: “We come here with a sense of the great debt that is owed the people of Cuba. What other country can point to a record of greater selflessness than Cuba has displayed in its relations to Africa?”

In all the reflections upon the death of Fidel Castro, his contribution to Africa has been neglected–because most Americans are unaware that Castro’s Cuba changed the course of southern African history. While Americans celebrated the peaceful transition of apartheid South Africa to majority rule and the long-delayed independence of Namibia, they had no idea that Cuba–Castro’s Cuba–played an essential role in these historic events.

During the Cold War, thousands of Cuban doctors, teachers, and construction workers went to Africa, while almost 30,000 Africans studied in Cuba on full scholarships funded by the Cuban government.

US officials tolerated Cuba’s humanitarian assistance, but not the dispatch of Cuban soldiers to Africa. There had been small Cuban covert operations in Africa in the 1960s in support of liberation movements, but the trickle became a flood in late 1975, engulfing Angola.

That Portuguese colony was slated for independence in November 1975, but civil war broke out several months earlier among the country’s three liberation movements–the MPLA, the FNLA, and UNITA. American officials were alarmed by the communist proclivities of the MPLA, but even they admitted that it “stood head and shoulders above the other two groups” which were led by corrupt men.

South African officials were also alarmed by the MPLA because of its implacable hostility to apartheid and promise to assist the liberation movements of southern Africa (UNITA and FNLA had proffered Pretoria their friendship).

By September 1975, the MPLA was winning the civil war. Therefore, Pretoria invaded Angola, encouraged by Washington. Secretary of State Kissinger hoped that success in Angola–defeating a pro-communist regime–would boost US prestige and his own reputation, pummeled by the fall of South Vietnam in April 1975.

The South Africans were on the verge of crushing the MPLA when 36,000 Cuban soldiers poured into Angola.

The intervention, the CIA concluded years later, had been “a unilateral Cuban operation designed in great haste.” The Agency was correct: Castro dispatched the soldiers without consulting the Kremlin. Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev, who was focused on detente with the United States, opposed Castro’s policy, and refused–for two months–to help transport the Cuban troops.

Castro’s decision also derailed his secret negotiations with Washington to normalize relations. Had Castro been pursuing Cuba’s narrow self-interest, he would not have sent troops to Angola.

What, then, motivated Castro’s bold move? The answer is provided by Kissinger. Castro, he wrote in his memoirs, “was probably the most genuine revolutionary leader then in power.”

The victory of the Pretoria-Washington axis, the installation of a regime in Luanda beholden to the apartheid regime, would have tightened the grip of white domination over the people of Southern Africa. Castro sent his soldiers to join the struggle against apartheid, a fight he deemed “the most beautiful cause.”

The Cuban troops turned the tide of the war, pushing the South Africans back into neighboring Namibia, which Pretoria illegally occupied.

“Black Africa is riding the crest of a wave generated by the Cuban success in Angola,” exulted The World, South Africa’s major black newspaper. “Black Africa is tasting the heady wine of the possibility of realizing the dream of total liberation.”

In Angola, the Cuban-backed MPLA government welcomed guerrillas from Namibia, South Africa, and Rhodesia. It became a tripartite effort: the Cubans provided most of the instructors, the Soviets the weapons, and the Angolans the land.

For apartheid South Africa it was a deadly threat. Therefore, for over a decade, Pretoria continued to battle the MPLA, attempting to install in its place the leader of UNITA, Jonas Savimbi, a man whom the British ambassador in Luanda labeled “a monster.”

The Angolan army was weak. Even the CIA conceded that the Cuban troops were “necessary to preserve Angolan independence,” but for the United States–under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan–the Cubans were an affront.

Reagan joined Pretoria in supporting Savimbi. He tightened the embargo against Cuba and demanded that the Cuban soldiers leave Angola. Castro refused. It was a stalemate.

Until 1988. It was the Iran-Contra scandal that broke the logjam. Before that imbroglio weakened Reagan, the Cubans had feared a US attack on their island. But in its wake, Castro decided it would be safe to send Cuba’s best planes, pilots, anti-aircraft systems and tanks to Angola to push the South Africans out of the country, once and for all. “We’ll manage without underpants in Cuba if we have to,” Raul Castro told a Soviet general. “We will send everything to Angola.”

Once again, Fidel had defied the Soviet Union. Gorbachev, bent on detente with the United States, opposed escalation in Angola. “The news of Cuba’s decision … was for us, I say it bluntly, a real surprise,” he told Castro. “I find it hard to understand how such decision could be taken without us.”

In early 1988 the Cuban troops gained the upper hand in Angola. They were strong enough to cross the Namibian border, seize South African bases, “and drive South African forces further south,” the Pentagon noted. The situation was “one of the most serious that has ever confronted South Africa,” the country’s president lamented.

Pretoria gave up. In December 1988, it agreed to Castro’s demands: allow UN supervised elections in Namibia and terminate aid to Savimbi. Pretoria’s capitulation reverberated beyond Angola and Namibia.

In Mandela’s words, the Cuban victory over the South African army “destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor … [and] inspired the fighting masses of South Africa. [It] was the turning point for the liberation of our continent–and of my people–from the scourge of apartheid.”

Featured Image credit: guards at the tomb of José Marti in Santiago, Cuba by PRA. CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/240485372/_/oupbloghistory/feed/3History,*Featured,angola unita,apartheid,Fidel Castro,angola cold war,cuban military intervention,south africa cold war,Latin America,jonas savimbi,cuba and angola,Henry Kissinger,Africa,Online products,Cuba,angola mpla,angola civil war,little known history,cuba cold warWhen Nelson Mandela visited Havana in 1991, he declared: “We come here with a sense of the great debt that is owed the people of Cuba. What other country can point to a record of greater selflessness than Cuba has displayed in its relations to Africa?”
In all the reflections upon the death of Fidel Castro, his contribution to Africa has been neglected–because most Americans are unaware that Castro's Cuba changed the course of southern African history. While Americans celebrated the peaceful transition of apartheid South Africa to majority rule and the long-delayed independence of Namibia, they had no idea that Cuba–Castro's Cuba–played an essential role in these historic events.
During the Cold War, thousands of Cuban doctors, teachers, and construction workers went to Africa, while almost 30,000 Africans studied in Cuba on full scholarships funded by the Cuban government.
US officials tolerated Cuba’s humanitarian assistance, but not the dispatch of Cuban soldiers to Africa. There had been small Cuban covert operations in Africa in the 1960s in support of liberation movements, but the trickle became a flood in late 1975, engulfing Angola.
That Portuguese colony was slated for independence in November 1975, but civil war broke out several months earlier among the country’s three liberation movements–the MPLA, the FNLA, and UNITA. American officials were alarmed by the communist proclivities of the MPLA, but even they admitted that it “stood head and shoulders above the other two groups” which were led by corrupt men.
South African officials were also alarmed by the MPLA because of its implacable hostility to apartheid and promise to assist the liberation movements of southern Africa (UNITA and FNLA had proffered Pretoria their friendship).
By September 1975, the MPLA was winning the civil war. Therefore, Pretoria invaded Angola, encouraged by Washington. Secretary of State Kissinger hoped that success in Angola–defeating a pro-communist regime–would boost US prestige and his own reputation, pummeled by the fall of South Vietnam in April 1975.
The South Africans were on the verge of crushing the MPLA when 36,000 Cuban soldiers poured into Angola. Jonas Savimbi, leader of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), Eege Foto (1989) vum user ernmuhl. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The intervention, the CIA concluded years later, had been “a unilateral Cuban operation designed in great haste.” The Agency was correct: Castro dispatched the soldiers without consulting the Kremlin. Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev, who was focused on detente with the United States, opposed Castro's policy, and refused–for two months–to help transport the Cuban troops.
Castro’s decision also derailed his secret negotiations with Washington to normalize relations. Had Castro been pursuing Cuba’s narrow self-interest, he would not have sent troops to Angola.
What, then, motivated Castro’s bold move? The answer is provided by Kissinger. Castro, he wrote in his memoirs, “was probably the most genuine revolutionary leader then in power.”
The victory of the Pretoria-Washington axis, the installation of a regime in Luanda beholden to the apartheid regime, would have tightened the grip of white domination over the people of Southern Africa. Castro sent his soldiers to join the struggle against apartheid, a fight he deemed “the most beautiful cause.”
The Cuban troops turned the tide of the war, pushing the South Africans back into neighboring Namibia, which Pretoria illegally occupied.
“Black Africa is riding the crest of a wave generated by the Cuban success in Angola,” exulted The World, South Africa’s major black newspaper. “Black Africa is tasting the heady wine of the possibility of realizing the dream of total ... When Nelson Mandela visited Havana in 1991, he declared: “We come here with a sense of the great debt that is owed the people of Cuba. What other country can point to a record of greater selflessness than Cuba has displayed in its relations to ... http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/240485372/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/12/celebrity-politics-before-trump/Celebrity and politics before Trumphttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/GErMBnUY_So/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/240457278/_/oupbloghistory/#respondThu, 08 Dec 2016 10:30:16 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=126334Donald Trump’s surprising victory in the 2016 US Presidential election demonstrated that celebrity is now a political force to be reckoned with. It would seem that this mix of celebrity culture and politics is a relatively new phenomenon, and indeed celebrity itself is often thought to be something distinctly modern. But there were celebrities long before that particular word identified them as such.

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Donald Trump’s surprising victory in the 2016 US Presidential election demonstrated that celebrity is now a political force to be reckoned with. Famous actors such as Ronald Reagan or Arnold Schwarzenegger have held high office in the past in the US, and and Indian film stars such as Jayalalithaa Jayaram or Maruthur Gopalan Ramachandran (popularly known as MGR) translated their fame into successful political careers, but Trump’s victory reveals the power of celebrity name recognition as a force for political mobilization, and has highlighted the theatrical aspects of political performance in our heavily mediated society. Trump’s success has already encouraged other celebrities such as Kanye West and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson to consider making their own presidential bids in the 2020 election. Pundits such as Michael Moore have suggested that the Democratic Party should support a celebrity candidate such as Tom Hanks or Oprah Winfrey as their standard bearer in the future if it wants to find its way back to electoral success.

It would seem that this mix of celebrity culture and politics is a relatively new phenomenon, and indeed celebrity itself is often thought to be something distinctly modern. It’s true that the word ‘celebrity’ didn’t refer to a particular person until around the mid-nineteenth century, and ‘celebrity’ didn’t refer to the experience of fame or popular renown until the later eighteenth century. The French historian Antoine Lilti has referred to celebrity as “a radically new form of renown.” It’s easy to understand why one might think that celebrity has only gradually become a politically potent currency.

But there were celebrities long before that particular word identified them as such, and there was a time when politics made celebrities rather than the other way around. Before the later eighteenth century, the word ‘celebrity’ tended to refer to ceremony. Celebrity was a way of describing the pomp and circumstance that traditionally accompanied important public rituals such as weddings, funerals, and royal processions. Celebrity was intricately linked to the magic, charm, and charisma associated with the church and royalty, and this meant that celebrity was inherently political – contemporary fame was produced by the majesty of royal or spiritual power, or preferably both. It’s important to understand this connection between premodern, ceremonial forms of fame, and their modern successors known as celebrities.

Modern celebrity is in many ways a product of the new publics created by the early modern printing revolution. The mass production of words and images enabled by the printing press allowed people to learn about, and recognize, contemporary figures in hitherto unprecedented ways. This early modern media revolution allowed for kings, queens, and religious leaders such as Martin Luther (1483-1546) or the English Protestant martyrs memorialized by John Foxe (1516/17–1587) to become famous with greater speed and extent than had been possible.

A page from the first edition of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, in 1563 by Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Image Collection. CC-BY-SA-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The political turmoils of early modern England helped to create new celebrities. The most effective means of turning ordinary people into celebrities was through persecution, and particularly through the spectacle of judicial process. Political trials were full-scale media events in early modern England. John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563) cultivated an appetite amongst early modern readers for the stories of the tribulations of otherwise ordinary people who were persecuted for their religious beliefs. In the seventeenth century, the stories of people who were prosecuted for political transgressions also garnered a large readership. By the early eighteenth century, these stories would be collected into volumes called State Trials (1719) and they would be reprinted, augmented, and further anthologized right through the nineteenth century. Works such as the State Trials and Foxe’s Acts and Monuments served to preserve for posterity the fame of individuals who had gained notoriety through their persecution.

In some cases, judicial persecution could create a political celebrity. The Tory clergyman, Dr. Henry Sacheverell, was impeached in Parliament for high crimes and misdemeanors in 1710 in response to some intemperate and fiery words he had preached at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Although Sacheverell was found guilty, his punishment was mercifully light – he was simply banned from preaching for three years and his sermon was ordered to be burned – and so he emerged from the experience as a celebrity and a hero for the Tory cause. Sacheverell became perhaps the best known person in England with the exception of the reigning monarch, Queen Anne, and he even took to imitating monarchical practices such as going on a celebrated progress across the country. Religious and political divisions helped to construct a new celebrity.

Perhaps it is too easy to forget that politics has always been at the heart of celebrity. While some historians of celebrity have been inclined to draw a direct line between the London stage of the eighteenth century through to modern-day Hollywood, it is better to remember that the charisma that is at the heart of celebrity has always been as much about power as well as entertainment.

During his presidency, Barack Obama has sometimes been referred to as ‘the first celebrity president’ in which he remodeled the presidency in ways that were more suited to twenty-first century forms of communication, such as social media, and his careful construction of a public persona that resembled likeable film stars more so than aloof policy wonks. While the juxtaposition of the presentation of personality for public entertainment as well as for political leadership has sometimes seemed awkward, theatricality and politics have always been closely related. The election of a former reality TV star to the office of President of the United States of America is less surprising than it might otherwise seem if we recognize the importance of attention grabbing and performance skills are to a highly mediated political culture such as our own.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/240457278/_/oupbloghistory/feed/0dwayne the rock johnson,*Featured,British history,antoine lilti,henry sacheverell,john foxe,Biography,Media,Barack Obama,martin luther,British,celebrity,Brian Cowan,eighteenth century celebrity,State Trials,Online products,Donald Trump,PoliticsDonald Trump’s surprising victory in the 2016 US Presidential election demonstrated that celebrity is now a political force to be reckoned with. Famous actors such as Ronald Reagan or Arnold Schwarzenegger have held high office in the past in the US, and and Indian film stars such as Jayalalithaa Jayaram or Maruthur Gopalan Ramachandran (popularly known as MGR) translated their fame into successful political careers, but Trump’s victory reveals the power of celebrity name recognition as a force for political mobilization, and has highlighted the theatrical aspects of political performance in our heavily mediated society. Trump’s success has already encouraged other celebrities such as Kanye West and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson to consider making their own presidential bids in the 2020 election. Pundits such as Michael Moore have suggested that the Democratic Party should support a celebrity candidate such as Tom Hanks or Oprah Winfrey as their standard bearer in the future if it wants to find its way back to electoral success.
It would seem that this mix of celebrity culture and politics is a relatively new phenomenon, and indeed celebrity itself is often thought to be something distinctly modern. It’s true that the word ‘celebrity’ didn’t refer to a particular person until around the mid-nineteenth century, and ‘celebrity’ didn’t refer to the experience of fame or popular renown until the later eighteenth century. The French historian Antoine Lilti has referred to celebrity as “a radically new form of renown.” It’s easy to understand why one might think that celebrity has only gradually become a politically potent currency.
But there were celebrities long before that particular word identified them as such, and there was a time when politics made celebrities rather than the other way around. Before the later eighteenth century, the word ‘celebrity’ tended to refer to ceremony. Celebrity was a way of describing the pomp and circumstance that traditionally accompanied important public rituals such as weddings, funerals, and royal processions. Celebrity was intricately linked to the magic, charm, and charisma associated with the church and royalty, and this meant that celebrity was inherently political – contemporary fame was produced by the majesty of royal or spiritual power, or preferably both. It’s important to understand this connection between premodern, ceremonial forms of fame, and their modern successors known as celebrities.
Modern celebrity is in many ways a product of the new publics created by the early modern printing revolution. The mass production of words and images enabled by the printing press allowed people to learn about, and recognize, contemporary figures in hitherto unprecedented ways. This early modern media revolution allowed for kings, queens, and religious leaders such as Martin Luther (1483-1546) or the English Protestant martyrs memorialized by John Foxe (1516/17–1587) to become famous with greater speed and extent than had been possible. A page from the first edition of John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, in 1563 by Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Image Collection. CC-BY-SA-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The political turmoils of early modern England helped to create new celebrities. The most effective means of turning ordinary people into celebrities was through persecution, and particularly through the spectacle of judicial process. Political trials were full-scale media events in early modern England. John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563) cultivated an appetite amongst early modern readers for the stories of the tribulations of otherwise ordinary people who were persecuted for their religious beliefs. In the seventeenth century, the stories of people who were prosecuted for political transgressions also garnered a large readership. By the early ... Donald Trump’s surprising victory in the 2016 US Presidential election demonstrated that celebrity is now a political force to be reckoned with. Famous actors such as Ronald Reagan or Arnold Schwarzenegger have held high office in the past in ... http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/240457278/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/12/propaganda-america-wwi/WWI propaganda in Americahttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/UO_QL7d-idc/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/239802488/_/oupbloghistory/#respondWed, 07 Dec 2016 09:30:37 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=125450By 1917, Americans increasingly became more concerned about the possible implications that would come with a German victory. With at-home values in mind, the United States presented propaganda to use as a call to action. The following slideshow portrays images of WWI propaganda used in the United States.

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By 1917, Americans increasingly became more concerned about the possible implications that would come with a German victory. With at-home values in mind, the United States presented propaganda to use as a call to action. For the first time ever, whole nations were involved in combat, and not merely professional armies. This medium was used to dehumanize the enemy and portray the growing hatred against them.

In order to convince the masses that there was a just cause behind the brutal and bloody conflict, propaganda was utilized, not only a means to gain cooperation from countries that remained neutral, but also to increase support of current allies, maintain people at home informed, and influence their opinion about the war. The following slideshow portrays images of WWI propaganda used in the United States:

"Destroy this mad brute"

During WWI, American propaganda depicted Germans as barbaric and violent-natured.

"Only the navy can stop this"

The negative imagery used to dehumanize the German military led to the persecution of German Americans during the war.

(Image: Image credit: “William Allen Rogers – Only the Navy Can Stop This” by William Allen Rogers for the US Navy Bureau, NY. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons).

"Anymore victories, Papa?"

American animosity towards Germany was used as a means to attack political opponents during the war. The above cartoon implies that enemy forces favor New York City mayoral candidates Morris Hillquit and John F. Hylan.

(Image: “New York Times cartoon 4 Nov 1917” by Marcus for The New York Times. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons).

"Over the top for you"

During WWI, the US Government released four issues of Liberty Loans. The Third Liberty Loan Act allowed the government to issue $3 billion worth of war bonds at a rate of 4.5% interest for up to 10 years.

(Image: “Over the top for you – Buy U.S. gov’t bonds, Third Liberty Loan” by Riesenberg, Sidney H. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons).

Featured Image Credit: American soldiers on the Piave front hurling a shower of hand grenades into the Austrian trenches by Sgt. A. Marcioni. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/239802488/_/oupbloghistory/feed/0History,The Great War,*Featured,Liberty Bonds,The Path to War,wwi,How the First World War Created Modern America,political cartoons,United States,Books,Michael S Neiberg,Images & Slideshows,America,war propaganda,us militaryBy 1917, Americans increasingly became more concerned about the possible implications that would come with a German victory. With at-home values in mind, the United States presented propaganda to use as a call to action. For the first time ever, whole nations were involved in combat, and not merely professional armies. This medium was used to dehumanize the enemy and portray the growing hatred against them.
In order to convince the masses that there was a just cause behind the brutal and bloody conflict, propaganda was utilized, not only a means to gain cooperation from countries that remained neutral, but also to increase support of current allies, maintain people at home informed, and influence their opinion about the war. The following slideshow portrays images of WWI propaganda used in the United States:
-
"Destroy this mad brute"
During WWI, American propaganda depicted Germans as barbaric and violent-natured.
(Image: “Destroy This Mad Brute propaganda poster” by US government related, H.R. Hopps 1917. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons). -
"Lend as they fight"
Sidney Riesenberg, a professional illustrator commissioned to create US Navy and Liberty Bond propaganda posters, is regarded as one of the greatest illustrators of the World War I era.
(Image: “Liberty Bond – 9” by Riesenberg, Sidney H. Public domain via Wikimedia Common). -
"I own a liberty bond"
The “I own a liberty bond” buttons were distributed as a means to encourage American patriotism on the home front during WWI.
(Image: “Liberty Bond – 1” by Edwards & Deutsch Litho. Co. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons). -
"Beat back the Hun with Liberty Bonds"
Liberty Bonds were promoted to Americans as a patriotic duty, and were first issued in 1917.
(Image: “German soldier with bloody bayonet and fingers” by Strothmann, F. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons). -
"Only the navy can stop this"
The negative imagery used to dehumanize the German military led to the persecution of German Americans during the war.
(Image: Image credit: “William Allen Rogers – Only the Navy Can Stop This” by William Allen Rogers for the US Navy Bureau, NY. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons). -
"Anymore victories, Papa?"
American animosity towards Germany was used as a means to attack political opponents during the war. The above cartoon implies that enemy forces favor New York City mayoral candidates Morris Hillquit and John F. Hylan.
(Image: “New York Times cartoon 4 Nov 1917” by Marcus for The New York Times. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons). -
"Over the top for you"
During WWI, the US Government released four issues of Liberty Loans. The Third Liberty Loan Act allowed the government to issue $3 billion worth of war bonds at a rate of 4.5% interest for up to 10 years.
(Image: “Over the top for you – Buy U.S. gov't bonds, Third Liberty Loan” by Riesenberg, Sidney H. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons).
Featured Image Credit: American soldiers on the Piave front hurling a shower of hand grenades into the Austrian trenches by Sgt. A. Marcioni. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The post WWI propaganda in America appeared first on OUPblog. By 1917, Americans increasingly became more concerned about the possible implications that would come with a German victory. With at-home values in mind, the United States presented propaganda to use as a call to action. For the first time ever, ... http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/239802488/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/12/edmund-burke-new-america/When is a revolution not a revolution? Edmund Burke and the new Americahttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/Xu6xvQI-Uzs/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/239319396/_/oupbloghistory/#respondTue, 06 Dec 2016 12:30:33 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=126021Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was an Irish statesman, author and orator, chiefly remembered for his championing of various causes such as Catholic emancipation, reform of the government of India and preserving the balance of the British constitution. It is commonly assumed that Edmund Burke took up incongruous positions on the American and French Revolutions...

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Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was an Irish statesman, author, and orator chiefly remembered for his championing of various causes such as Catholic emancipation, reform of the government of India, and preserving the balance of the British constitution. It is commonly assumed that Edmund Burke took up incongruous positions on the American and French Revolutions: that he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Americans, and a bitter opponent of the French. Much ingenuity was expended by Burke’s contemporaries and others since, in seeking to explain this seemingly considerable change in his political beliefs — a shift to the right, from Whiggism towards a more conservative stance.

Burke’s speeches provide an interesting window into this apparent volte-face, with Burke himself denying that there had been any such change. In his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs of 1791, he wrote of himself in the third person that “if he could venture to value himself upon anything, it is on the virtue of consistency that he would value himself most.” In relation to the American and the French Revolutions, this was not implausible. There can be no question about Burke’s unremitting hostility to change in France — but on America, he condemned the British policies that he believed were bringing on the crisis with the colonies, utterly rejected their forcible coercion, and accepted their right to meet force with force, and in the process to throw off British authority. But did this mean that he endorsed the American Revolution?

If the American Revolution is defined as the achievement of independence from Britain, then Burke (even though he hoped that having defeated unjustifiable British aggression against them, the Americans would accept a form of continuing union) can be regarded as a supporter of it. But the American Revolution was about more than independence. It was a movement of political and social change that produced something very different from the survival of the old colonial order without British rule. Burke had deep reservations about such changes.

Burke’s chief fear was that Americans would depart from their inheritance of the British constitution, which he believed they’d been defending from British transgressions. In 1791 he wrote that if “the Americans had rebelled merely to enlarge their liberty, Mr. Burke would have thought very differently of the American cause.” Some of the early state constitutions enacted after 1776 must have confirmed his anxieties. In January 1777 he warned Americans against “Untried forms of Government.” True liberty could only be maintained by union with Britain “under the present limited monarchy.”

Burke’s attitude to the post-war Republic was ambivalent. He initially argued it should be put on the same footing as the thirteen colonies, in having free commercial access to the British Empire. But he was later recorded as speaking intemperately to an American about suggestions that more trade concessions should be made to the United States: “Great Britain could do, As she had done without America. That she was not yet a conquered Country and ought not to be treated with Insolence.”

The terms of the Federal Constitution, however, served to reconcile Burke to American independence. On 6 May 1791 he said that the Americans “had erected Republics as near to the principles of our Constitution as Republics could be … They have guarded their constitution by reciprocal checks, they have established an imitation of the House of Lords and House of Commons of this Country, a Congress, and a Senate.”

By a strained, but not a totally indefensible, interpretation of the American Constitution – as the culmination of a conservative movement, in which the Americans had acted “on a defensive footing” aiming to preserve for themselves the constitution which Britain had violated, Burke had vindicated his consistency, at least in his own eyes. He opposed revolution in France while supporting justified resistance which, he claimed, had not amounted to a revolution in America.

Featured Image Credit: “The Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton, January 3, 1777”, Yale University Art Gallery. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/239319396/_/oupbloghistory/feed/0History,American independence,*Featured,French Revolution,P.J. Marshall,Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke,britain,Whiggism,Philosophy,american constitution,American Revolution,America,politics,Online products,eighteenth-century,edmund burke,Politics,usaEdmund Burke (1729-1797) was an Irish statesman, author, and orator chiefly remembered for his championing of various causes such as Catholic emancipation, reform of the government of India, and preserving the balance of the British constitution. It is commonly assumed that Edmund Burke took up incongruous positions on the American and French Revolutions: that he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Americans, and a bitter opponent of the French. Much ingenuity was expended by Burke's contemporaries and others since, in seeking to explain this seemingly considerable change in his political beliefs — a shift to the right, from Whiggism towards a more conservative stance.
Burke’s speeches provide an interesting window into this apparent volte-face, with Burke himself denying that there had been any such change. In his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs of 1791, he wrote of himself in the third person that “if he could venture to value himself upon anything, it is on the virtue of consistency that he would value himself most.” In relation to the American and the French Revolutions, this was not implausible. There can be no question about Burke's unremitting hostility to change in France — but on America, he condemned the British policies that he believed were bringing on the crisis with the colonies, utterly rejected their forcible coercion, and accepted their right to meet force with force, and in the process to throw off British authority. But did this mean that he endorsed the American Revolution?
If the American Revolution is defined as the achievement of independence from Britain, then Burke (even though he hoped that having defeated unjustifiable British aggression against them, the Americans would accept a form of continuing union) can be regarded as a supporter of it. But the American Revolution was about more than independence. It was a movement of political and social change that produced something very different from the survival of the old colonial order without British rule. Burke had deep reservations about such changes. Image Credit: Edmund Burke, painted by James Northcote. (1746-1831). Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Burke's chief fear was that Americans would depart from their inheritance of the British constitution, which he believed they’d been defending from British transgressions. In 1791 he wrote that if “the Americans had rebelled merely to enlarge their liberty, Mr. Burke would have thought very differently of the American cause.” Some of the early state constitutions enacted after 1776 must have confirmed his anxieties. In January 1777 he warned Americans against “Untried forms of Government.” True liberty could only be maintained by union with Britain “under the present limited monarchy.”
Burke's attitude to the post-war Republic was ambivalent. He initially argued it should be put on the same footing as the thirteen colonies, in having free commercial access to the British Empire. But he was later recorded as speaking intemperately to an American about suggestions that more trade concessions should be made to the United States: “Great Britain could do, As she had done without America. That she was not yet a conquered Country and ought not to be treated with Insolence.”
The terms of the Federal Constitution, however, served to reconcile Burke to American independence. On 6 May 1791 he said that the Americans “had erected Republics as near to the principles of our Constitution as Republics could be … They have guarded their constitution by reciprocal checks, they have established an imitation of the House of Lords and House of Commons of this Country, a Congress, and a Senate.”
By a strained, but not a totally indefensible, interpretation of the American Constitution – as the culmination of a conservative movement, in which the Americans had acted “on a ... Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was an Irish statesman, author, and orator chiefly remembered for his championing of various causes such as Catholic emancipation, reform of the government of India, and preserving the balance of the British constitution.http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/239319396/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/12/map-family-names-britain-ireland/The history behind selected family names in Britain and Ireland [map]http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/YEedJvb-OlY/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/239267178/_/oupbloghistory/#respondTue, 06 Dec 2016 10:30:34 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=126302We all have a surname, but how many of us know anything about its roots – origin, history, and what it means today? Family names are evidence of the diverse language and cultural movement of people who have settled in Britain and Ireland over history. Surnames can be varied, but not uncommon - for example there a large amount of occupational names like Smith and Baker.

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We all have a surname, but how many of us know anything about its roots – origin, history, and what it means today?

Family names are evidence of the diverse language and cultural movement of people who have settled in Britain and Ireland over history. Surnames can be varied, but not uncommon — for example there a large amount of occupational names like Smith and Baker, names linked to a place such as Hill or Green as well as nicknames like Goodfellow and Longbones.

In the map below you can explore some of the local surnames across the UK, in current and former counties, from the 1881 census (England, Scotland, and Wales) and in the 1847-64 censuses (Northern and Southern Ireland). The names reflect an abundance of cultural influences, including French, Dutch, Jewish, and Scandinavian. Can you find yours?

Featured image credit: Highlands And Islands Scotland by LoboStudioHamburg. Public Domain via Pixabay.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/239267178/_/oupbloghistory/feed/0linguistics history,*Featured,Linguistics,British history,oxford dictionary of family names,surnames,Etymology of Names,interactive map,name origin,Europe,British,etymology,Geography,linguistics,Dictionaries & Lexicography,Online products,family names,Oxford Reference,Maps,irelandWe all have a surname, but how many of us know anything about its roots – origin, history, and what it means today?
Family names are evidence of the diverse language and cultural movement of people who have settled in Britain and Ireland over history. Surnames can be varied, but not uncommon — for example there a large amount of occupational names like Smith and Baker, names linked to a place such as Hill or Green as well as nicknames like Goodfellow and Longbones.
In the map below you can explore some of the local surnames across the UK, in current and former counties, from the 1881 census (England, Scotland, and Wales) and in the 1847-64 censuses (Northern and Southern Ireland). The names reflect an abundance of cultural influences, including French, Dutch, Jewish, and Scandinavian. Can you find yours?
Featured image credit: Highlands And Islands Scotland by LoboStudioHamburg. Public Domain via Pixabay.
The post The history behind selected family names in Britain and Ireland [map] appeared first on OUPblog. We all have a surname, but how many of us know anything about its roots – origin, history, and what it means today?
Family names are evidence of the diverse language and cultural movement of people who have settled in Britain and Ireland ... http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/239267178/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/12/noam-chomsky-at-88/Chomsky at 88http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/-bzLUD_PKLM/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/239221612/_/oupbloghistory/#respondTue, 06 Dec 2016 08:30:33 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=126228Few probably anticipated that the boy who was born on this day in 1928 would become one of the founding fathers of modern linguistics and one of the world’s foremost intellectuals. Noam Avram Chomsky’s foundational work has influenced, inspired, and divided scholars working on language for more than 60 years.

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Few probably anticipated that the boy who was born on 7 December, 1928, would become one of the founding fathers of modern linguistics and one of the world’s foremost intellectuals. Avram Noam Chomsky’s foundational work has influenced, inspired, and divided scholars working on language for more than sixty years.

A biological capacity for language

Perhaps Chomsky’s most seminal contribution is the idea that there is a biological blueprint for language. This blueprint, shared by all humans, leaves room for individual variation within limits. But given ordinary exposure to speech, it is impossible for an ordinary child to not acquire at least one language. Similarly, a dry sponge spontaneously soaks up water. However, unlike a sponge, humans also come with restrictions on what a possible human language can be. Words are not just beads on a string, rather, they are hierarchically ordered. Hierarchy explains why standard English has The story about elephants is funny and not The story about elephants are funny, even though the plural elephants is closer to the verb than the singular story. The hypothesis is that we will not find a language where all grammatical rules are defined based on linearity, and so far, such a language has not been found. As usual, there are individual cases that merit further discussions, but no single language as a whole has rules that are purely linearly defined.

Growing a part of human psychology

Chomsky views language as a mental phenomenon, which is to say that it is part of our cognition. A core question has been what the initial conditions are when a human begins to acquire language. Hierarchy may be one such prior condition, meaning that a child will expect that all grammatical rules are hierarchically defined. This is not to say that this is something that is conscious to us, rather, we do it automatically and we don’t even know it until we take a class in linguistics! But Chomsky holds that there is a finite space of possible human grammars and that a core task is to delineate this space. That will explain how language acquisition is possible once all the intricate facts about human languages are taken into account.

The meaning of words

Chomsky’s approach to linguistics is very technical as it was inspired by formal mathematical approaches to language. It is generally called ‘generative grammar’ to illustrate that the goal is to determine characterizations of how sentences are generated. In addition, Chomsky has also battled with the nature of meaning from a more philosophical point of view. He has engaged in intense discussions with the leading analytic philosophers of our time, such as Hilary Putnam and Willard van Orman Quine. In all his work, Chomsky has never hesitated to challenge orthodoxy, which is also true of his contributions to the field of philosophy of language: Chomsky has championed an approach which relies on our internal mental structures, arguing that meaning is in the head, not simply out there in the world by way of a word referring to some entity (say, the word car referring to what is depicted in Figure 1).

Chomsky’s approach to language has met with both praise and fierce opposition. Many scholars argue that language is simply acquired by virtue of generalizations over input by way of analogy making and distributional analyses. A good illustration of the debate is this piece by Paul Ibbotson and Michael Tomasello, which is to be contrasted by this reply by Jeff Lidz. The present author is clearly partial to the view espoused by Lidz, but the debate is nevertheless illustrative of the kind of engagement Chomsky’s work has generated and keeps generating.

Even though Chomsky’s approach to language is contested, it has been remarkably influential. Virtually all approaches to language relate their approach to Chomsky in some way or other. Chomsky’s approach has been the natural defining point for decades, which is a significant hallmark of its impact. To this day, Chomsky remains active as a linguist, writing and lecturing across the world. However, his main focus is today on a rather different part that has followed him throughout his life, namely his work as a political dissident. As such, Chomsky personifies what many think of as a true intellectual: An expert on his particular field, but also someone with a social and societal engagement. In his 88th year, there is nothing that suggests that he won’t still be going strong for many years to come.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/239221612/_/oupbloghistory/feed/0Noam Chomsky,*Featured,Linguistics,paul ibbotson,jeff lidz,chomsky politics,michael tomasello,Biography,Chomsky,hilary putnam,linguistics,biological blueprint for language,chomsky intellectual,Harvard,william van orman quineFew probably anticipated that the boy who was born on 7 December, 1928, would become one of the founding fathers of modern linguistics and one of the world’s foremost intellectuals. Avram Noam Chomsky’s foundational work has influenced, inspired, and divided scholars working on language for more than sixty years.
A biological capacity for language
Perhaps Chomsky’s most seminal contribution is the idea that there is a biological blueprint for language. This blueprint, shared by all humans, leaves room for individual variation within limits. But given ordinary exposure to speech, it is impossible for an ordinary child to not acquire at least one language. Similarly, a dry sponge spontaneously soaks up water. However, unlike a sponge, humans also come with restrictions on what a possible human language can be. Words are not just beads on a string, rather, they are hierarchically ordered. Hierarchy explains why standard English has The story about elephants is funny and not The story about elephants are funny, even though the plural elephants is closer to the verb than the singular story. The hypothesis is that we will not find a language where all grammatical rules are defined based on linearity, and so far, such a language has not been found. As usual, there are individual cases that merit further discussions, but no single language as a whole has rules that are purely linearly defined.
Growing a part of human psychology
Chomsky views language as a mental phenomenon, which is to say that it is part of our cognition. A core question has been what the initial conditions are when a human begins to acquire language. Hierarchy may be one such prior condition, meaning that a child will expect that all grammatical rules are hierarchically defined. This is not to say that this is something that is conscious to us, rather, we do it automatically and we don’t even know it until we take a class in linguistics! But Chomsky holds that there is a finite space of possible human grammars and that a core task is to delineate this space. That will explain how language acquisition is possible once all the intricate facts about human languages are taken into account.
The meaning of words
Chomsky’s approach to linguistics is very technical as it was inspired by formal mathematical approaches to language. It is generally called ‘generative grammar’ to illustrate that the goal is to determine characterizations of how sentences are generated. In addition, Chomsky has also battled with the nature of meaning from a more philosophical point of view. He has engaged in intense discussions with the leading analytic philosophers of our time, such as Hilary Putnam and Willard van Orman Quine. In all his work, Chomsky has never hesitated to challenge orthodoxy, which is also true of his contributions to the field of philosophy of language: Chomsky has championed an approach which relies on our internal mental structures, arguing that meaning is in the head, not simply out there in the world by way of a word referring to some entity (say, the word car referring to what is depicted in Figure 1). Figure 1. Image by M 93, CC BY-SA 3.0 de via Wikimedia Commons.
Status quo and impact
Chomsky’s approach to language has met with both praise and fierce opposition. Many scholars argue that language is simply acquired by virtue of generalizations over input by way of analogy making and distributional analyses. A good illustration of the debate is this piece by Paul Ibbotson and Michael Tomasello, which is to be contrasted by this reply by Jeff Lidz. The present author is clearly partial to the view espoused by Lidz, but the debate is nevertheless illustrative of the kind of engagement Chomsky’s work has generated and keeps generating.
Even though Chomsky’s approach to language is contested, it has been remarkably influential. Virtually all approaches to ... Few probably anticipated that the boy who was born on 7 December, 1928, would become one of the founding fathers of modern linguistics and one of the world’s foremost intellectuals. Avram Noam Chomsky’s foundational work has ... http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/239221612/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/12/place-of-the-year-shortlist-2016/Announcing the Place of the Year 2016 shortlisthttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/kPVcmNqq50A/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/238734228/_/oupbloghistory/#commentsMon, 05 Dec 2016 10:30:23 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=126415The year is winding down and we are nearing the end of our search for the Place of the Year. Thank you to everyone who voted for their pick in the longlist.

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The year is winding down and we are nearing the end of our search for the Place of the Year. Thank you to everyone who voted for their pick in the longlist. We have narrowed down to the top 4, and the results are quite telling–Aleppo, Tristan da Cunha, The Mediterranean Sea, and the U.K. are all moving on to the shortlist. Each of these places represent something unique about the political, humanitarian, and environmental landscape of 2016. Let’s now revisit the top 4 places and why we are highlighting them in this year. Then, make your voice heard with our Twitter poll.

Aleppo

News from Aleppo in 2016 has been consistently tragic with the Syrian Civil War still raging on. Civilians in Aleppo have been living under a blockade and lack access to basic needs such as electricity and food. The city has been bombarded by Russia and Syria in an effort to quash the Islamic State, though it has been estimated that around half the casualties have been children. A photograph of a young boy in Aleppo, bleeding and covered in ash brought the horror of the Syrian Civil War to the world’s attention. As one candidate for President of the United States demonstrated publicly, many people still are unaware of the situation in Aleppo.

Tristan da Cunha

Tristan da Cunha represents so much of what is most fascinating about planet Earth. The most remote inhabited island in the world, Tristan da Cunha is interesting enough with that fact alone. This year, the community of the remotest island began to take steps towards becoming entirely self-sufficient.

The Mediterranean Sea

The Mediterranean Sea embodies the migrant crisis—record-breaking numbers of people, primarily from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, have risked or lost their lives this year while crossing this sea. According to the UN, 3,800 migrants have died in the Mediterranean Sea so far this year, making 2016 already the deadliest year on record.

The U.K.

The U.K. made its biggest splash in international news with its vote for the Brexit—the colloquial term for Britain parting ways with the European Union. The results of the vote were something of a shock to the world political and economic stage. David Cameron stepped down as Prime Minister of Great Britain shortly after the decision was made final. The effects of Brexit are felt far beyond European borders.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/238734228/_/oupbloghistory/feed/1place of the year,*Featured,Sociology,The Mediterranean Sea,Syria,Syrian civil war,Tristan da Cunha,refugee,refugee crisis,Books,Europe,Aleppo,brexit,POTY,Geography,Atlas of the World,Place of the Year,The U.K.,The UK,Middle East,PoliticsThe year is winding down and we are nearing the end of our search for the Place of the Year. Thank you to everyone who voted for their pick in the longlist. We have narrowed down to the top 4, and the results are quite telling–Aleppo, Tristan da Cunha, The Mediterranean Sea, and the U.K. are all moving on to the shortlist. Each of these places represent something unique about the political, humanitarian, and environmental landscape of 2016. Let's now revisit the top 4 places and why we are highlighting them in this year. Then, make your voice heard with our Twitter poll.
Aleppo
News from Aleppo in 2016 has been consistently tragic with the Syrian Civil War still raging on. Civilians in Aleppo have been living under a blockade and lack access to basic needs such as electricity and food. The city has been bombarded by Russia and Syria in an effort to quash the Islamic State, though it has been estimated that around half the casualties have been children. A photograph of a young boy in Aleppo, bleeding and covered in ash brought the horror of the Syrian Civil War to the world’s attention. As one candidate for President of the United States demonstrated publicly, many people still are unaware of the situation in Aleppo.
Tristan da Cunha
Tristan da Cunha represents so much of what is most fascinating about planet Earth. The most remote inhabited island in the world, Tristan da Cunha is interesting enough with that fact alone. This year, the community of the remotest island began to take steps towards becoming entirely self-sufficient.
The Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea embodies the migrant crisis—record-breaking numbers of people, primarily from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, have risked or lost their lives this year while crossing this sea. According to the UN, 3,800 migrants have died in the Mediterranean Sea so far this year, making 2016 already the deadliest year on record.
The U.K.
The U.K. made its biggest splash in international news with its vote for the Brexit—the colloquial term for Britain parting ways with the European Union. The results of the vote were something of a shock to the world political and economic stage. David Cameron stepped down as Prime Minister of Great Britain shortly after the decision was made final. The effects of Brexit are felt far beyond European borders.
Now is your chance to vote for the Oxford University Press Place of the Year for 2016 https://t.co/IqGhpMifyU
— Oxford Academic (@OUPAcademic) December 5, 2016
Images: (1) “Aleppo 03” by Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. (2) “Tristan da Cunha, British overseas territory-20March2012” by Brian Gratwicke, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons (3) Refugee escape by Gerd Altmann, Public Domain via Pixabay (4) London by Adam Derewecki, Public Domain via Pixabay Featured image: Globe by Unsplash, Public Domain via Pixabay.
The post Announcing the Place of the Year 2016 shortlist appeared first on OUPblog. The year is winding down and we are nearing the end of our search for the Place of the Year. Thank you to everyone who voted for their pick in the longlist. We have narrowed down to the top 4, and the results are quite telling–http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/238734228/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/12/gershom-scholem-intellectualism/The paradoxical intellectualism of Gershom Scholemhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/xkFEdH_ZZuQ/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/238239746/_/oupbloghistory/#respondSun, 04 Dec 2016 10:30:48 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=125389Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) is widely known as the founder of the academic study of Jewish mysticism or Kabbalah. In the nearly thirty-five years since his death, Scholem’s star has continue to shine brightly in the intellectual firmament and perhaps even more brightly now than in his lifetime.

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Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) is widely known as the founder of the academic study of Jewish mysticism or Kabbalah. In the nearly thirty-five years since his death, Scholem’s star has continued to shine brightly in the intellectual firmament and perhaps even more brightly now than in his lifetime. This year alone, two books about Scholem are appearing in English, with a third scheduled for next year, and several more in the pipeline. What accounts for this growing fascination with a figure whose field of research was highly esoteric, and inaccessible to those without specialized knowledge?

The answer to this question is both sociological and intellectual. Scholem occupied an unusual place among German intellectuals of the twentieth century. A committed Zionist, he left Germany for Palestine in 1923. But, from a cultural point of view, he never really left. He continued throughout his long career to write and publish in German. When Hitler came to power and a flood of German Jewish refugees came to Palestine, Scholem played a central role in the intellectual circles of the intellectuals among them, such as Hans Jonas, George Lichtheim and Martin Buber. But Scholem also forged strong friendships with intellectuals who found refuge in America, notably Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt. Although he and Adorno differed on many issues – notably dialectical materialism – they found much common ground, since Scholem was deeply rooted in German philosophy and literature in addition to the Jewish tradition. He may have made his home in a Middle Eastern backwater, but from his apartment in Jerusalem, he inhabited a dense network of intellectuals stretching from Europe to America and beyond. Indeed, at times it even seems as if he was at the center of this network.

The rhetorical passion with which Scholem wrote is another reason why his work continues to speak so powerfully to readers. Consider, for example, the conclusion of his 1937 essay, “Redemption Through Sin,” on the messianic Sabbatian movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries:

Even while still “believers” – in fact, precisely because they were “believers” – they [the Sabbatians] had long been drawing closer to the spirit of Haskalah all along, so that when the flame of their faith finally flickered out they soon reappeared as leaders of Reform Judaism, secular intellectuals, or simply complete and indifferent skeptics … Those who survived the ruin were now open to any alternative or wind of change; and so, their “mad visions” behind them, they turned their energies and hidden desires for a more positive life to assimilation and the Haskalah, two forces that accomplished without paradoxes, indeed without religion at all, what they, the members of “the accursed sect,” had earnestly striven for in a stormy contention with truth, carried on in the half-light of a faith pregnant with paradoxes (“Redemption Through Sin,” in Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York, 1971), 140-141).

We have a sense here of a scholar able to inhabit the minds of his subjects and convey the inner contradictions and paradoxes of their beliefs. Although more recent scholars may have challenged any number of his conclusions, Scholem’s extraordinary prose continues to give his work its compelling quality.

Finally, Scholem’s own philosophical and metaphysical struggles cannot be divorced from his historical research. From his youth, he was obsessed with questions of language and silence. God, he thought, was hidden and inaccessible, his revelation wordless and, by itself, meaningless. Only the tradition, the sum-total of all responses to that revelation in human language, gave it meaning. Scholem found these same ideas in the Kabbalah, for whom the Infinite God was hidden and unknowable. He believed that Franz Kafka, the writer with whom he most identified, had described in a secular language the same mystical insight. Kafka, like the Kabbalists, walked a “fine line between religion and nihilism.”

And what of Scholem himself? Hardly a nihilist, he was nevertheless fascinated by those aspects of religion that threaten to destroy the world that gave them birth. Sabbatianism, that rebellion against rabbinic law, was a paradoxical product of the Kabbalah, a mystical movement that challenged the very religion out of which it grew and thus ushered in the modern world. For Scholem, such paradoxical and dialectical movements were necessary to propel history, but they were also extraordinarily dangerous since they could destroy everything in their wake. Small wonder that Scholem believed that Zionism drew its vital energies from the messianic tradition, but that it could only succeed if it neutralized those energies before they exploded it from within. And so it was that a scholar of an esoteric tradition came to warn his contemporaries that the tradition he studied could not be safely relegated to the past, since its nihilistic potential could still break forth in a secular world.

Featured image credit: Scholem Jewish mysticism archive in the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, photo by Haimlevy. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/238239746/_/oupbloghistory/feed/0Religion,*Featured,paradox,scholem,Zionism,Jewish studies,Philosophy,jewish mysticism,Biography,gershom scholem,jewish,kabbalah,jewish philosophy,Online products,kafka,sabbatianism,nihilism,Middle EastGershom Scholem (1897-1982) is widely known as the founder of the academic study of Jewish mysticism or Kabbalah. In the nearly thirty-five years since his death, Scholem’s star has continued to shine brightly in the intellectual firmament and perhaps even more brightly now than in his lifetime. This year alone, two books about Scholem are appearing in English, with a third scheduled for next year, and several more in the pipeline. What accounts for this growing fascination with a figure whose field of research was highly esoteric, and inaccessible to those without specialized knowledge?
The answer to this question is both sociological and intellectual. Scholem occupied an unusual place among German intellectuals of the twentieth century. A committed Zionist, he left Germany for Palestine in 1923. But, from a cultural point of view, he never really left. He continued throughout his long career to write and publish in German. When Hitler came to power and a flood of German Jewish refugees came to Palestine, Scholem played a central role in the intellectual circles of the intellectuals among them, such as Hans Jonas, George Lichtheim and Martin Buber. But Scholem also forged strong friendships with intellectuals who found refuge in America, notably Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt. Although he and Adorno differed on many issues – notably dialectical materialism – they found much common ground, since Scholem was deeply rooted in German philosophy and literature in addition to the Jewish tradition. He may have made his home in a Middle Eastern backwater, but from his apartment in Jerusalem, he inhabited a dense network of intellectuals stretching from Europe to America and beyond. Indeed, at times it even seems as if he was at the center of this network.
The rhetorical passion with which Scholem wrote is another reason why his work continues to speak so powerfully to readers. Consider, for example, the conclusion of his 1937 essay, “Redemption Through Sin,” on the messianic Sabbatian movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries:
Even while still “believers” – in fact, precisely because they were “believers” – they [the Sabbatians] had long been drawing closer to the spirit of Haskalah all along, so that when the flame of their faith finally flickered out they soon reappeared as leaders of Reform Judaism, secular intellectuals, or simply complete and indifferent skeptics … Those who survived the ruin were now open to any alternative or wind of change; and so, their “mad visions” behind them, they turned their energies and hidden desires for a more positive life to assimilation and the Haskalah, two forces that accomplished without paradoxes, indeed without religion at all, what they, the members of “the accursed sect,” had earnestly striven for in a stormy contention with truth, carried on in the half-light of a faith pregnant with paradoxes (“Redemption Through Sin,” in Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York, 1971), 140-141). Gershom Scholem in 1935 by Jonund. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
We have a sense here of a scholar able to inhabit the minds of his subjects and convey the inner contradictions and paradoxes of their beliefs. Although more recent scholars may have challenged any number of his conclusions, Scholem’s extraordinary prose continues to give his work its compelling quality.
Finally, Scholem's own philosophical and metaphysical struggles cannot be divorced from his historical research. From his youth, he was obsessed with questions of language and silence. God, he thought, was hidden and inaccessible, his revelation wordless and, by itself, meaningless. Only the tradition, the sum-total of all responses to that revelation in human language, gave it meaning. Scholem found these same ideas in the Kabbalah, for whom the Infinite God was hidden and unknowable. ... Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) is widely known as the founder of the academic study of Jewish mysticism or Kabbalah. In the nearly thirty-five years since his death, Scholem’s star has continued to shine brightly in the intellectual firmament ... http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/238239746/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/12/forgotten-poems-scotland/Scots Wa Who? Forgotten poems of Scotlandhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/IB8J2Wxee30/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/237742730/_/oupbloghistory/#respondSat, 03 Dec 2016 11:30:51 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=126015Scotland has inspired much celebrated poetry over the ages, from the stirring verses of Robert Burns, to the imaginative tales of Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Scott. These poets are now household names, but how many outside of Scotland have heard of William Dunbar or James Hogg?

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Scotland has inspired much celebrated poetry over the ages, from the stirring verses of Robert Burns, to the imaginative tales of Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Scott. These poets are now household names, but how many outside of Scotland have heard of William Dunbar or James Hogg? O Flower of Scotland is a tune joyously sung by many – but could you sing along to The Flowers of Scotland? For that matter, English poets such as William Cowper and William Wordsworth are known for their romantic descriptions of everyday life, but their odes to the land north of the border are less well known. With St. Andrews Day having just passed, we’re taking a look at some of OSEO’s lesser known Scots poets (and poetry), as well as the southerners inspired by this braw and bonnie land.

William Dunbar (c.1459-1530)

William Dunbar was a Scottish poet closely associated with the court of King James IV. He penned an astoundingly diverse body of work (roughly 90 poems, mostly in Scots dialect) which still provide inspiration today. Although he isn’t a well-known name outside of Scotland, Dunbar’s reputation amongst his contemporaries was great, and he was eulogised by Walter Scott, claiming he was “unrivalled by any which Scotland has produced.” Dunbar’s work, The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie, is the earliest surviving example of the Scots flyting genre, in which two rivals hurl insults at the other:

Bot wondir laith wer I to be ane baird,Flyting to use for gritly I eschame;For it is nowthir wynnyng nor rewairdBot tinsale baith of honour and of fame,Incres of sorrow, sklander and evill name

William Cowper (1731-1800)

Although best remembered for his English nature poetry — writing about ordinary life and scenes from his homeland, Cowper often found time to describe events further afield. The poem below, A Tale, was inspired by a local news story from Glasgow — in which a Chaffinch’s nest was reported to have appeared at the head of a ship’s mast, whilst moored at Greenock. Despite being “occasionally lowered for the inspection of the curious” the birds never abandoned their nest:

In Scotland’s realm, where trees are few,Nor even shrubs abound,But where, however bleak the view,Some better things are found,

For Husband there, and Wife may boastTheir union undefil’d,And false ones are as rare almostAs hedge-rows in the wild

James Hogg was a largely self-educated Scottish poet and novelist, who worked as a shepherd and farmhand as a young man. Despite his lowly origins, Hogg was friends with many of the great writers and thinkers of the day, and indeed became known as the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’ — a pseudonym which he embraced. In 1801, Hogg was asked to collect ballads for Walter Scott’s The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and he found a love of rousing songs and poetry. One such is Hogg’s The Hay-Makers, an invigorating celebration of work and romance:

This bonny day amang the hay, I’ll mind till death us twine; An’ often bless the happy day That made my laddie mine.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Wordsworth was one of the major English Romantic poets, whose Lyrical Ballads helped to launch the Romantic Movement in literature. Despite his fame, Wordsworth’s experiences in Scotland are less well-known. In 1803, he took a six-week, 663-mile journey through the Scottish Highlands with his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth. Whilst Dorothy memorialised the trip in her Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland (argued to be one of the best Scottish travel accounts of the period), Wordsworth left behind this enchanting poem To a Highland Girl — written in 1803 “upon Lock Lomond” and published four years later:

Nor am I loth, though pleased at heart,Sweet Highland Girl! from thee to part;For I, methinks, till I grow old,As fair before me shall behold,As I do now, the cabin small,The lake, the bay, the waterfall;And Thee, the Spirit of them all!

Robert Burns (1759-1796)

At the end of this briefest of round-ups, it would seem amiss to not give the final words to the most beloved of Scotland’s bards — Burns himself. Scots Wha Hae has served for centuries as the country’s unofficial national anthem — as the patriotic rallying cry of Robert Bruce facing the English army at the Battle of Bannockburn. Although tunes such as O Flower of Scotland and Scotland the Brave have often replaced it at major events, it remains one of the nation’s most stirring cries:

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/237742730/_/oupbloghistory/feed/0History,St Andrew's Day,William Dunbar,*Featured,james hogg,Oxford Scholarly Editions Online,scotland,Arts & Humanities,Scots Wha Hae,robert burns,British,Poetry,robert louis stevenson,William Cowper,William Wordsworth,Online products,O Flower of Scotland,Walter Scott,LiteratureScotland has inspired much celebrated poetry over the ages, from the stirring verses of Robert Burns, to the imaginative tales of Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Scott. These poets are now household names, but how many outside of Scotland have heard of William Dunbar or James Hogg? O Flower of Scotland is a tune joyously sung by many – but could you sing along to The Flowers of Scotland? For that matter, English poets such as William Cowper and William Wordsworth are known for their romantic descriptions of everyday life, but their odes to the land north of the border are less well known. With St. Andrews Day having just passed, we’re taking a look at some of OSEO's lesser known Scots poets (and poetry), as well as the southerners inspired by this braw and bonnie land.
William Dunbar (c.1459-1530)
William Dunbar was a Scottish poet closely associated with the court of King James IV. He penned an astoundingly diverse body of work (roughly 90 poems, mostly in Scots dialect) which still provide inspiration today. Although he isn’t a well-known name outside of Scotland, Dunbar’s reputation amongst his contemporaries was great, and he was eulogised by Walter Scott, claiming he was “unrivalled by any which Scotland has produced.” Dunbar’s work, The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie, is the earliest surviving example of the Scots flyting genre, in which two rivals hurl insults at the other:
Bot wondir laith wer I to be ane baird,
Flyting to use for gritly I eschame;
For it is nowthir wynnyng nor rewaird
Bot tinsale baith of honour and of fame,
Incres of sorrow, sklander and evill name
William Cowper (1731-1800)
Although best remembered for his English nature poetry — writing about ordinary life and scenes from his homeland, Cowper often found time to describe events further afield. The poem below, A Tale, was inspired by a local news story from Glasgow — in which a Chaffinch’s nest was reported to have appeared at the head of a ship’s mast, whilst moored at Greenock. Despite being “occasionally lowered for the inspection of the curious” the birds never abandoned their nest:
In Scotland's realm, where trees are few,
Nor even shrubs abound,
But where, however bleak the view,
Some better things are found,
For Husband there, and Wife may boast
Their union undefil'd,
And false ones are as rare almost
As hedge-rows in the wild
James Hogg (1770-1835) Image Credit: “James Hogg, 1770 – 1835. Poet; 'The Ettrick Shepherd,'” Scottish National Gallery. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
James Hogg was a largely self-educated Scottish poet and novelist, who worked as a shepherd and farmhand as a young man. Despite his lowly origins, Hogg was friends with many of the great writers and thinkers of the day, and indeed became known as the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’ — a pseudonym which he embraced. In 1801, Hogg was asked to collect ballads for Walter Scott’s The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and he found a love of rousing songs and poetry. One such is Hogg’s The Hay-Makers, an invigorating celebration of work and romance:
Then tak my hand, ye hae my heart;
There's nane I like sae weel;
An' Heaven grant I act my part
To ane sae true an' leal.
This bonny day amang the hay,
I'll mind till death us twine;
An' often bless the happy day
That made my laddie mine.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Wordsworth was one of the major English Romantic poets, whose Lyrical Ballads helped to launch the Romantic Movement in literature. Despite his fame, Wordsworth’s experiences in Scotland are less well-known. In 1803, he took a six-week, 663-mile journey through the Scottish Highlands with his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth. Whilst Dorothy memorialised the trip in her Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland (argued to be one of the best Scottish ... Scotland has inspired much celebrated poetry over the ages, from the stirring verses of Robert Burns, to the imaginative tales of Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Scott. These poets are now household names, but how many outside of Scotland have ... http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/237742730/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/12/matthias-determann-interview/An Interview with Jörg Matthias Determannhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/ENv7nW5hzKM/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/237247862/_/oupbloghistory/#respondFri, 02 Dec 2016 12:30:03 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=126007When I first started researching historiography in Saudi Arabia, I came across many publications by government organizations, as they were the most readily available. At first glance, many of these history books told the same story: a narrative that focused on the royal family and its creation of a first Saudi state during the eighteenth century, a second Saudi state during the nineteenth century, and finally the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during the twentieth century.

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Jörg Matthias Determann is an assistant professor of history in the Liberal Arts and Sciences Program at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. His work has focused on global history in general, as well as the history of science and scholarship in Muslim-majority countries. The editors of Oxford Islamic Studies Online had the opportunity to discuss recent developments in the Gulf States and how they will impact education, research, and international relations.

Much of your research focuses on institutions of higher learning in Saudi Arabia, a country viewed by many in the West as particularly repressive and anti-democratic. And yet, as you state, the field of history in particular has provided a medium for dissenting voices within the country. Can you discuss some of the examples of this dissent?

When I first started researching historiography in Saudi Arabia, I came across many publications by government organizations, as they were the most readily available. At first glance, many of these history books told the same story: a narrative that focused on the royal family and its creation of a first Saudi state during the eighteenth century, a second Saudi state during the nineteenth century, and finally the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during the twentieth century. Areas or periods without Saudi rule and beyond the reach of the Wahhabi mission were often marginalized and described in negative terms of ignorance and division, in contrast to the true religion and unity brought by the House of Saud and the family of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.

However, as I read state-sponsored publications more carefully and, during fieldwork, came across many privately published works, I discovered a surprising plurality in historical narratives. Some historians, who had completed their postgraduate education in America with the aid of Saudi government scholarships, questioned the extent of religious ignorance in pre-Wahhabi Arabia and explained the rise of the first Saudi state partly with a previous rise in religious learning. Various non-professional historians also reclaimed the history of regions distant from the Saudi capital and asserted the importance of previously marginalized groups, including the Shia and different tribes, in the unification and development of the country.

In the areas of both science and history, you emphasize the impact of international networks. How exactly have these influenced education and research in the region? And how have some of the local governments reacted to this?

The countries forming the Gulf Cooperation Council enjoyed a wealth of natural resources, but had relatively few qualified nationals to develop modern states and economies. Therefore, they relied more than many other countries on imported expertise and labor. In many fields of education and research, the first generation of professionals largely consisted of foreigners who were supposed to train nationals. As a result, the natural sciences have mostly been taught in English rather than Arabic at the university level. Scientific research has also been published mostly in English, with Arabic newspapers and magazines often struggling to catch up in their reports of new discoveries. Committed to rapid development, Gulf governments facilitated the international circulation of researchers, but rarely awarded citizenship to foreign residents. Partly because of their lack of full integration into Gulf societies, many scientists continued to follow foreign models rather than contributing to distinctly local schools or traditions of research. They were, however, often aware of the sensitivity of certain subjects, such as evolution, in local contexts.

Evolution remains a very contentious issue in the Middle East, largely because of its association with atheism and its contradiction of certain literal interpretations of Scripture. But the way many Arabs view evolution deviates from, say, creationists in the Bible Belt of the United States. Can you give a brief explanation of how evolution is received in this region? What exactly are people rejecting? The timeline? The role of natural selection? The role of mutation? The apparent lack of purpose?

Because the teaching of evolution is limited and most scientific research is published in English rather than Arabic, understanding of evolution is shallow among broad sections of society and more shaped by religious scholars than scientists. Many people believe in God’s creation of Adam and Eve rather than in the emergence of modern humans through an evolutionary process. The notion of human descent from an ape-like ancestor is particularly offensive to them. While believing in certain adaptations of organisms to their environment, they oppose the general idea that one species could turn into another (except through God’s intervention). Unlike many Christians in America, most people in the Middle East are not Young Earth creationists, however. Although Christian creationists have influenced their Muslim counterparts in rejecting fossils as evidence of evolution, many people in the region are comfortable with the idea of Earth being billions of years old.

Is there a particular area of evolutionary science that has posed a challenge to the status quo in this part of the world? For example, has a specific discovery or general trend captured the imagination of researchers, such as the uncovering of a certain fossil, or the extinction of a species, or the growing science of evolutionary psychology?

Many ancestors of modern humans and other animals who left Africa on land would have first reached the Middle East before spreading to other parts of Eurasia. As a result, discoveries of primate fossils in the region are particularly interesting. In 2009, researchers from the University of Michigan and the Saudi Geological Survey discovered near Mecca a fossil of Saadanius hijazensis, an Oligocene intermediary between apes and Old World monkeys. The journal Naturepublished the finding, and BBC Arabicdescribed this creature as a potential “missing link in the evolution of apes and humans.” Saudi newspapers and magazines covered this discovery too, but largely refrained from referring to evolution.

Desert climates are among the most at-risk regions of the world according to most climate change models. How are local universities and other institutions using their burgeoning resources to address this issue? At the same time, how does this square with the region’s role in the global oil industry?

Researchers from King Saud University and Taif University, together with colleagues from Ohio State University and the Frankfurt Zoological Garden, studied the effects of climate change on animals in Saudi Arabia. They warned that rising air temperatures would have a detrimental impact on diurnal desert animals, including the already threatened Arabian oryx. Conscious of global warming and declining oil reserves, the Gulf states have invested in energy-saving and renewable-energy projects, such as Masdar City in Abu Dhabi and the Qatar Green Building Council. At present, the funding for these projects, and the Gulf economies in general, still largely depend on oil and gas production. Nevertheless, I am hopeful that solar and wind power will become viable alternatives to fossil fuels in the Arab region in future decades.

Do you foresee any specific developments or contributions that will be unique to the region? I’m thinking in particular of the efforts to diversify the sciences in order to transition away from the oil industry. But perhaps there are other, unexpected directions.

I have become especially interested in Arab space science, about which I am currently writing a book. While medieval Arabic contributions to astronomy are relatively well known, the modern history of this discipline in the region is far less so. Yet, spurred by development agendas and the collective memory of a golden age of Arabic and Islamic civilization, Arab states have invested significantly in space science and technology. In 1985, the first two Arab satellites, Arabsat-1A and -1B were launched into orbit. They and their successors enabled the expansion of satellite television in the region, which in turn contributed to a strengthening of Arab identity and inadvertently to the uprisings of 2011. Despite the challenges brought by these uprisings, governments in the region, as elsewhere, have continued to see space science and technology as vital to their future. The Qatar National Research Fund has supported a Qatar Exoplanet Survey through its flagship National Priorities Research Program. In 2014, the United Arab Emirates established a national space agency and announced an Emirates Mars Mission to be launched in 2020. An unmanned probe, named Al Amal “Hope”, is supposed to explore the dynamics of the Martian atmosphere. Long-term planning, financial resources and international collaboration will perhaps enable the Gulf countries to become hubs for space transport in the future, as they are already for air and sea transport.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/237247862/_/oupbloghistory/feed/0History,Religion,God's creation,*Featured,United Arab Emirates,shia,climate change,Abu Dhabi,Islamic universities,gulf states,Matthias Determann,evolution theory,middle east,Geography,Islam,q&a,Online products,Qatar,Saudi Arabia,science and religion,Middle East,Qatar national research fund,science and islamJörg Matthias Determann is an assistant professor of history in the Liberal Arts and Sciences Program at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. His work has focused on global history in general, as well as the history of science and scholarship in Muslim-majority countries. The editors of Oxford Islamic Studies Online had the opportunity to discuss recent developments in the Gulf States and how they will impact education, research, and international relations.
Much of your research focuses on institutions of higher learning in Saudi Arabia, a country viewed by many in the West as particularly repressive and anti-democratic. And yet, as you state, the field of history in particular has provided a medium for dissenting voices within the country. Can you discuss some of the examples of this dissent?
When I first started researching historiography in Saudi Arabia, I came across many publications by government organizations, as they were the most readily available. At first glance, many of these history books told the same story: a narrative that focused on the royal family and its creation of a first Saudi state during the eighteenth century, a second Saudi state during the nineteenth century, and finally the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during the twentieth century. Areas or periods without Saudi rule and beyond the reach of the Wahhabi mission were often marginalized and described in negative terms of ignorance and division, in contrast to the true religion and unity brought by the House of Saud and the family of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.
However, as I read state-sponsored publications more carefully and, during fieldwork, came across many privately published works, I discovered a surprising plurality in historical narratives. Some historians, who had completed their postgraduate education in America with the aid of Saudi government scholarships, questioned the extent of religious ignorance in pre-Wahhabi Arabia and explained the rise of the first Saudi state partly with a previous rise in religious learning. Various non-professional historians also reclaimed the history of regions distant from the Saudi capital and asserted the importance of previously marginalized groups, including the Shia and different tribes, in the unification and development of the country.
In the areas of both science and history, you emphasize the impact of international networks. How exactly have these influenced education and research in the region? And how have some of the local governments reacted to this?
The countries forming the Gulf Cooperation Council enjoyed a wealth of natural resources, but had relatively few qualified nationals to develop modern states and economies. Therefore, they relied more than many other countries on imported expertise and labor. In many fields of education and research, the first generation of professionals largely consisted of foreigners who were supposed to train nationals. As a result, the natural sciences have mostly been taught in English rather than Arabic at the university level. Scientific research has also been published mostly in English, with Arabic newspapers and magazines often struggling to catch up in their reports of new discoveries. Committed to rapid development, Gulf governments facilitated the international circulation of researchers, but rarely awarded citizenship to foreign residents. Partly because of their lack of full integration into Gulf societies, many scientists continued to follow foreign models rather than contributing to distinctly local schools or traditions of research. They were, however, often aware of the sensitivity of certain subjects, such as evolution, in local contexts.
Evolution remains a very contentious issue in the Middle East, largely because of its association with atheism and its contradiction of certain literal interpretations of Scripture. But the way many Arabs view evolution deviates from, say, creationists in the Bible Belt of the ... Jörg Matthias Determann is an assistant professor of history in the Liberal Arts and Sciences Program at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. His work has focused on global history in general, as well as the history of science and ... http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/237247862/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/12/italy-uk-expand-heathrow/Italy, and the UK decision to expand Heathrowhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/2ffVcBUaOUk/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/237159920/_/oupbloghistory/#respondFri, 02 Dec 2016 08:30:16 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=125207As Graham Ruddick put it in the Guardian on 26 October, ‘One by one, Theresa May’s government is giving the go-ahead to major infrastructure projects that will cost taxpayers billions of pounds’. By doing so, she signalled her determination to promote growth and the creation of new jobs, as well as to offset the oft predicted economic downturn following Brexit.

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The Italian public has decisively turned against major infrastructure projects. Will the UK follow in Italy’s footsteps after the decision to expand Heathrow airport?

As Graham Ruddick put it in the Guardian on 26 October, ‘One by one, Theresa May’s government is giving the go-ahead to major infrastructure projects that will cost taxpayers billions of pounds.’ By doing so, she signalled her determination to promote growth and the creation of new jobs, as well as to offset the oft predicted economic downturn following Brexit. According to The Independent, the business case for the expansion of Heathrow airport was ‘overwhelming.’ Admittedly, there were strong objections on environmental grounds, yet ‘if the green argument is judged to be paramount, then we would not build new capacity at all, and that would have very serious consequences for economic growth.’

Until recently in the UK, the case for economic growth appeared to be fairly uncontroversial. This was in stark contrast to Italy where economic modernization has for some time been contested and opposed, effectively thwarting successive Prime Ministers’ attempts to relaunch major public works. Disaffection with the myth of material progress and well-being has spread through society, hence the critique of economic growth and modernization is not restricted to intellectuals or ‘loony greens.’ In 1986 the country saw the birth of the Slow Food Movement, whose Manifesto proclaimed that ‘In the name of productivity, the “fast life” has changed our lifestyle and now threatens our environment and our land (and city) scapes.’ Its founder, Carlo Petrini, later developed it into a global organization. This was followed by the Movement for Happy Degrowth, founded at the beginning of the 2000s and inspired by the philosophy of Serge Latouche, a radical opponent of the idea that economic growth equals progress.

Similar ideas have been at the roots of sustained opposition to grandiose public works projects like the construction of a high-speed railway line in the Susa Valley near Turin, or the much publicized bridge linking Sicily to the mainland. In the Susa valley, the NO TAV movement against high-speed trains developed in the 1990s and has since been able to gather widespread popular support among local residents and public administrators. As their website states: ‘The locals’ concerns and proposals are being completely ignored in the name of the only Modern God: money.’

While the mainstream political parties, primarily Forza Italia under Silvio Berlusconi, and the Democratic Party under Matteo Renzi, endeavoured to popularize bold narratives of innovation and growth, the 5-Star Movement led by ex-comedian Beppe Grillo embraced the protest movements, rapidly becoming the second largest party in Italy. In June 2016, two candidates of the Movement were elected mayors of Rome and Turin, Virginia Raggi in the capital city and Chiara Appendino in Turin. Both have since clearly demonstrated their determined opposition to major public works and events. The former scuppered Italy’s bid to hold the 2024 Olympic Games in Rome and the latter reiterated her disapproval of the high-speed railway project, appointing prominent leaders of the NO TAV movement to positions of responsibility in her local government.

Will the opposition to the expansion of Heathrow airport spearhead comparable popular movements such as the ones in Italy in the UK? Has the vote in favour of Brexit already signalled that a majority of people no longer prioritise economic growth if it is perceived to threaten their lifestyle? While Theresa May’s clear-cut commitment to major new public works post-Brexit indicates that for her material expansion and progress remain overriding concerns and are non-negotiable, she may soon discover, as Italian prime ministers already have, that the public appetite’s for growth has greatly diminished, if it is deemed to come at the expense of their quality of life.

Featured image credit: London Heathrow airport by graceful. Public domain via Pixabay.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/237159920/_/oupbloghistory/feed/0Democratic Party,economic growth,*Featured,Modern Italy,Silvio Berlusconi,Carlo Petrini,Very Short Introductions,italy,Serge Latouche,very short Introductions,NO TAV movement,Modern Italy: A Very Short Introduction,Europe,brexit,Forza Italia,Anna Cento Bull,VSI,Heathrow,Matteo Renzi,Social Sciences,Theresa May,Business & EconomicsThe Italian public has decisively turned against major infrastructure projects. Will the UK follow in Italy’s footsteps after the decision to expand Heathrow airport?
As Graham Ruddick put it in the Guardian on 26 October, ‘One by one, Theresa May’s government is giving the go-ahead to major infrastructure projects that will cost taxpayers billions of pounds.’ By doing so, she signalled her determination to promote growth and the creation of new jobs, as well as to offset the oft predicted economic downturn following Brexit. According to The Independent, the business case for the expansion of Heathrow airport was ‘overwhelming.’ Admittedly, there were strong objections on environmental grounds, yet ‘if the green argument is judged to be paramount, then we would not build new capacity at all, and that would have very serious consequences for economic growth.’
Until recently in the UK, the case for economic growth appeared to be fairly uncontroversial. This was in stark contrast to Italy where economic modernization has for some time been contested and opposed, effectively thwarting successive Prime Ministers’ attempts to relaunch major public works. Disaffection with the myth of material progress and well-being has spread through society, hence the critique of economic growth and modernization is not restricted to intellectuals or ‘loony greens.’ In 1986 the country saw the birth of the Slow Food Movement, whose Manifesto proclaimed that ‘In the name of productivity, the “fast life” has changed our lifestyle and now threatens our environment and our land (and city) scapes.’ Its founder, Carlo Petrini, later developed it into a global organization. This was followed by the Movement for Happy Degrowth, founded at the beginning of the 2000s and inspired by the philosophy of Serge Latouche, a radical opponent of the idea that economic growth equals progress.
Similar ideas have been at the roots of sustained opposition to grandiose public works projects like the construction of a high-speed railway line in the Susa Valley near Turin, or the much publicized bridge linking Sicily to the mainland. In the Susa valley, the NO TAV movement against high-speed trains developed in the 1990s and has since been able to gather widespread popular support among local residents and public administrators. As their website states: ‘The locals’ concerns and proposals are being completely ignored in the name of the only Modern God: money.’
While the mainstream political parties, primarily Forza Italia under Silvio Berlusconi, and the Democratic Party under Matteo Renzi, endeavoured to popularize bold narratives of innovation and growth, the 5-Star Movement led by ex-comedian Beppe Grillo embraced the protest movements, rapidly becoming the second largest party in Italy. In June 2016, two candidates of the Movement were elected mayors of Rome and Turin, Virginia Raggi in the capital city and Chiara Appendino in Turin. Both have since clearly demonstrated their determined opposition to major public works and events. The former scuppered Italy’s bid to hold the 2024 Olympic Games in Rome and the latter reiterated her disapproval of the high-speed railway project, appointing prominent leaders of the NO TAV movement to positions of responsibility in her local government.
Will the opposition to the expansion of Heathrow airport spearhead comparable popular movements such as the ones in Italy in the UK? Has the vote in favour of Brexit already signalled that a majority of people no longer prioritise economic growth if it is perceived to threaten their lifestyle? While Theresa May’s clear-cut commitment to major new public works post-Brexit indicates that for her material expansion and progress remain overriding concerns and are non-negotiable, she may soon discover, as Italian prime ministers already ... The Italian public has decisively turned against major infrastructure projects. Will the UK follow in Italy’s footsteps after the decision to expand Heathrow airport?
As Graham Ruddick put it in the Guardian on 26 October, ‘http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/237159920/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/12/winnicott-radio-broadcasts/Winnicott: the ‘good-enough mother’ radio broadcastshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/unk1bCNBAS8/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/236702804/_/oupbloghistory/#respondThu, 01 Dec 2016 12:30:42 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=126071Our appetite for books on baby care seems unquenchable. The combination of the natural curiosity and uncertainty of the expectant mother, the unknowable mind of the infant, and the expectations of society creates a void filled with all kinds of manuals and confessionals offering advice, theory, reassurance, anecdotes, schedules… and inevitably, inconsistency, disagreement, and further anxiety.

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Our appetite for books on baby care seems unquenchable. The combination of the natural curiosity and uncertainty of the expectant mother, the unknowable mind of the infant, and the expectations of society creates a void filled with all kinds of manuals and confessionals offering advice, theory, reassurance, anecdotes, schedules… and inevitably, inconsistency, disagreement, and further anxiety.

One figure who has remained relevant through the passing generations, very much due to his resistance to giving practical advice which inevitably becomes faddish over time, is the English paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1896-1971). While many of his ideas persist 70 years on in the form of frozen, if familiar, sound bites: the ‘good-enough mother’; the ‘ordinary devoted mother’; that ‘there is no such thing as a baby, only a baby and a mother’; and the ‘transitional object’ (the security blanket) to name a few, his message remains timeless.

The core of Winnicott’s work on parenting was given through nearly 60 radio broadcast talks on the BBC, many on Women’s Hour, across the two decades from the middle of the Second World War. The subject – expressions of psychoanalytic concepts for mothers – was potentially risky to the corporation, culturally progressive, and to Winnicott and his producers at a time of seismic social change, vitally important. While he was a natural communicator who had earned his spurs in the crowded children’s wards of London hospitals, Winnicott needed to be moulded into a broadcaster capable of expressing complex and sensitive issues without scandalising his audience of unsuspecting ordinary mothers: a task which required a series of astute, sensitive, and firm producers. Reinforcing the emerging role of women after the war as cultural consumers and cultural commissioners, all Winnicott’s producers and collaborators at the BBC were women.

Winnicott’s speaking style, lacking the demotic rhythm of his contemporary, the ‘radio doctor’ Charles Hill, was straightforwardly relatable and reassuring, as he told mothers “You will be able to see that really I am saying quite ordinary obvious things”, or, to take a topical example: “by devoted, I simply mean devoted”. Winnicott’s broadcast voice has a relaxed, almost murmuring, quality and his relatively high pitch was frequently mistaken for the voice of a woman. His thoughtful manner, his extensive use of pre-recorded documentary conversation between mothers, and his vocal hermaphroditism, allowed him to completely relinquish the role of an educated male expert talking to the uneducated female public. He was instead beside the listener, speaking on behalf of the infant, putting into words what the mother already knew.

Winnicott’s career emerged during a period of wartime where it was only too easy for state propaganda, regarding physical care, to supersede all else. Truby King was campaigning for food hygiene while proposing rigid scheduled feeding on the basis that regular infantile hunger built strength of character. Many United Kingdom maternity wards employed practices of shocking insensitivity to the mother-baby relationship, in which the physically-orientated ‘expertise’ of the nurses countermanded the new mother’s basic instincts.

Winnicott, on the contrary, argued that the mother herself is the specialist in her own baby, and that professionals must not take away the mother’s confidence in her instincts and natural knowledge. He professed himself “allergic to propaganda”, telling mothers “you will be relieved that I am not going to tell you what to do,” “but,” he continued, “I can talk about what it all means.” He was later accused of de-intellectualising mothers, by his insistence that intelligence – as compared to love – was both unnecessary and insufficient for mothering, but I think rather he would sympathise with the current trend of expressing this attitude as: mothers have had enough of experts.

D. W. Winnicott for The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott. Reproduced with permission.

He was not afraid of what he called “the seamy side of home life”, and wanted mothers to hear that he knew about the role of non-loving feelings in infant care. He imagined the mother who allows herself to say “Damn you, you little bugger” to her baby, and in another broadcast gave airtime to reasons a mother might hate – as well as love – her child.

Winnicott’s own work was soon overshadowed by Benjamin Spock, who acknowledged his debt to Winnicott by crediting him as the underlying theoretical model of his childcare guidance manual; that is, while giving the very kind of advice Winnicott had expressly avoided and even dismissed as unhelpful.

Spock said of Winnicott that his contribution “all adds up to reliability and love”, but this only tells the first half of the story. Winnicott’s most enduring mothering idea is of the ‘good-enough mother’, a phrase intended to liberate parents from the millstone of aspirational perfection. Once the infant knows the mother can reliably provide during the baby’s early state of complete dependence, it is through the bust-ups and bungles of being good-enough rather than perfect that the infant finds out about his own developing needs. The child discovers he is not within the suffocating realm of parental omniscience, nor are the parents within the tyranny of the baby’s omnipotent control. He finds that rage and phantasies of destruction do not magically destroy the world, except in his creative imagination. Beyond this lies a widening horizon of emotional development: anger, disappointment, reparation, and eventually, independence, and gratitude.

Featured image credit: Radio by ArtmoGraphicDesigner. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/236702804/_/oupbloghistory/feed/0History,expectant mother,motherhood,Second World War,*Featured,Audio & Podcasts,Science & Medicine,children,parenting,radio broadasts,bbc broadcasts,child development,infant care,The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott,Psychology & Neuroscience,Benjamin Spock,Benjamin Spock and Winnicott,good-enough mother,Donald Winnicott,Books,Winnicott’s work on parenting,British,babies,radio,d. w. winnicott,paediatrician,Robert Adès,childcare,emotional development,parent bond,baby care,charles hill,infant,winnicott broadcastsOur appetite for books on baby care seems unquenchable. The combination of the natural curiosity and uncertainty of the expectant mother, the unknowable mind of the infant, and the expectations of society creates a void filled with all kinds of manuals and confessionals offering advice, theory, reassurance, anecdotes, schedules… and inevitably, inconsistency, disagreement, and further anxiety.
One figure who has remained relevant through the passing generations, very much due to his resistance to giving practical advice which inevitably becomes faddish over time, is the English paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1896-1971). While many of his ideas persist 70 years on in the form of frozen, if familiar, sound bites: the ‘good-enough mother’; the ‘ordinary devoted mother’; that ‘there is no such thing as a baby, only a baby and a mother’; and the ‘transitional object’ (the security blanket) to name a few, his message remains timeless.
The core of Winnicott’s work on parenting was given through nearly 60 radio broadcast talks on the BBC, many on Women’s Hour, across the two decades from the middle of the Second World War. The subject – expressions of psychoanalytic concepts for mothers – was potentially risky to the corporation, culturally progressive, and to Winnicott and his producers at a time of seismic social change, vitally important. While he was a natural communicator who had earned his spurs in the crowded children’s wards of London hospitals, Winnicott needed to be moulded into a broadcaster capable of expressing complex and sensitive issues without scandalising his audience of unsuspecting ordinary mothers: a task which required a series of astute, sensitive, and firm producers. Reinforcing the emerging role of women after the war as cultural consumers and cultural commissioners, all Winnicott’s producers and collaborators at the BBC were women.
What Irks the Ordinary Mother? [CW 6:1:7] From “The Ordinary Devoted Mother and Her Baby” BBC Broadcast series.
Winnicott’s speaking style, lacking the demotic rhythm of his contemporary, the ‘radio doctor’ Charles Hill, was straightforwardly relatable and reassuring, as he told mothers “You will be able to see that really I am saying quite ordinary obvious things”, or, to take a topical example: “by devoted, I simply mean devoted”. Winnicott’s broadcast voice has a relaxed, almost murmuring, quality and his relatively high pitch was frequently mistaken for the voice of a woman. His thoughtful manner, his extensive use of pre-recorded documentary conversation between mothers, and his vocal hermaphroditism, allowed him to completely relinquish the role of an educated male expert talking to the uneducated female public. He was instead beside the listener, speaking on behalf of the infant, putting into words what the mother already knew.
Winnicott’s career emerged during a period of wartime where it was only too easy for state propaganda, regarding physical care, to supersede all else. Truby King was campaigning for food hygiene while proposing rigid scheduled feeding on the basis that regular infantile hunger built strength of character. Many United Kingdom maternity wards employed practices of shocking insensitivity to the mother-baby relationship, in which the physically-orientated ‘expertise’ of the nurses countermanded the new mother’s basic instincts.
Winnicott, on the contrary, argued that the mother herself is the specialist in her own baby, and that professionals must not take away the mother’s confidence in her instincts and natural knowledge. He professed himself “allergic to propaganda”, telling mothers “you will be relieved that I am not going to tell you what to do,” “but,” he continued, “I ... Our appetite for books on baby care seems unquenchable. The combination of the natural curiosity and uncertainty of the expectant mother, the unknowable mind of the infant, and the expectations of society creates a void filled with all kinds of ... http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/236702804/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/11/jacob-tonson-spy-businessman/Jacob Tonson the elder, international spy and businessmanhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/10cByV1bcAc/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/234153786/_/oupbloghistory/#respondSun, 27 Nov 2016 10:30:54 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=125687Few have heard of him today, but Jacob Tonson the Elder (1656?-1736) was undoubtedly one of the most important booksellers in the history of English literature. He numbered Addison, Behn, Congreve, Dryden, Echard, Oldmixon, Prior, Steele, and Vanbrugh among those canonical authors whom he published. His reputation was international, and the quality and range of his classical editions remained a benchmark throughout the eighteenth century.

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Few have heard of him today, but Jacob Tonson the elder (1656?-1736) was undoubtedly one of the most important booksellers in the history of English literature. He numbered Addison, Behn, Congreve, Dryden, Echard, Oldmixon, Prior, Steele, and Vanbrugh among those canonical authors whom he published. His reputation was international, and the quality and range of his classical editions remained a benchmark throughout the eighteenth century. Having a reputation outside of England was an extremely rare thing for the time, and this was remarkably brought to light by a letter from Johann Rudolf Holzer (1678–1736).

Holzer was a politician and bibliophile of minor Swiss aristocracy, also a member of the Grand Council and a Provincial Governor of County Büren. He wrote, on 11 November 1730 (originally in French):

Every day such excellent books come from the press in England & you stand out to such advantage among your colleagues through the admirable editions for which the public is in your debt, that it is enough that a book comes from your press for one to be assured that it will be equally good and attractive […] Since I was born curious and our bookshops have not the wherewithal to satisfy my curiosity, I have [MS illegible], Sir, been unable to do better than to apply directly to you to satisfy my desires, persuading myself that a man who has made himself so useful to the public would certainly want to help me hunt out good books which are available in your country…

– Manuscript: British Library, Add. MSS., 28,275, fol. 266.

Dated from 1730 (after Tonson the elder had retired from publishing), this letter is evidently addressed to him, given the references to his earlier publications. Holzer may not even have known of the existence of Jacob Tonson the younger (1682-1735), Tonson’s business partner and heir, who by this time would have been the recipient of this letter.

Despite the confusion over recipients, the letter is exceptional among Tonson’s correspondence, in that it was originally in French. This is particularly telling, as Tonson could speak and read French, having possibly been a spy in France, reporting on the ‘Plenipotentiary-Extraordinary Matthew Prior’ when he was ostensibly on ‘business in Europe’ on behalf of his press. The preliminaries for the Treaty of Utrecht (April 1713), which had ended the War of the Spanish Succession, had been negotiated by Prior. He was treated with considerable suspicion by the Whigs (a British political party), and, after the fall of the Tory ministry (1714), was arrested for treason. If Tonson had been a spy however, he has been dismissed by his most recent biographer (Ophelia Field) as ‘inept.’

Having said this, it is also of interest that the letter comes from such a high up European official. Tonson’s reputation in Great Britain was high, as can be seen from his association with men, including politicians and authors, who became members of the ‘Whig Kit Cat Club’ (an esteemed London literary and political group), which he founded. This example of his reputation in Europe was not without precedent however, as his edition of Dryden’s translation of The Works of Virgil (1697) was hotly anticipated by royalty and elites both in England, as well as on the continent. Addison even wrote to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz that “this Edition of this Book … will probably be the noblest volume that ever came from the English Press.”

Cumulatively, the correspondence surrounding the Tonsons sheds substantial light on the editorial and publishing practices of the most important and successful publishing house at the time. They show the level of connections and discourse going on in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century – revealing a thoroughly cosmopolitan and intellectual elite. As such, letters like these offer an important and timely window on the ‘history of the book’ at a significant moment in English and European literary history.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/234153786/_/oupbloghistory/feed/0History,Joseph Addison,*Featured,Leibniz,correspondence,KitKat Club,Stephen Bernard,Jacob Tonson,Matthew Prior,Treaty of Utrecht,Europe,europe,spy,War of Spanish Succession,Online products,Whigs,Literature,publishing,espionage,letters,VirgilFew have heard of him today, but Jacob Tonson the elder (1656?-1736) was undoubtedly one of the most important booksellers in the history of English literature. He numbered Addison, Behn, Congreve, Dryden, Echard, Oldmixon, Prior, Steele, and Vanbrugh among those canonical authors whom he published. His reputation was international, and the quality and range of his classical editions remained a benchmark throughout the eighteenth century. Having a reputation outside of England was an extremely rare thing for the time, and this was remarkably brought to light by a letter from Johann Rudolf Holzer (1678–1736).
Holzer was a politician and bibliophile of minor Swiss aristocracy, also a member of the Grand Council and a Provincial Governor of County Büren. He wrote, on 11 November 1730 (originally in French):
Every day such excellent books come from the press in England & you stand out to such advantage among your colleagues through the admirable editions for which the public is in your debt, that it is enough that a book comes from your press for one to be assured that it will be equally good and attractive […] Since I was born curious and our bookshops have not the wherewithal to satisfy my curiosity, I have [MS illegible], Sir, been unable to do better than to apply directly to you to satisfy my desires, persuading myself that a man who has made himself so useful to the public would certainly want to help me hunt out good books which are available in your country…
– Manuscript: British Library, Add. MSS., 28,275, fol. 266.
Dated from 1730 (after Tonson the elder had retired from publishing), this letter is evidently addressed to him, given the references to his earlier publications. Holzer may not even have known of the existence of Jacob Tonson the younger (1682-1735), Tonson’s business partner and heir, who by this time would have been the recipient of this letter. Image Credit: 'Jacob Tonson' (1717) by Sir Godfrey Kneller, from the National Portrait Gallery. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Despite the confusion over recipients, the letter is exceptional among Tonson’s correspondence, in that it was originally in French. This is particularly telling, as Tonson could speak and read French, having possibly been a spy in France, reporting on the ‘Plenipotentiary-Extraordinary Matthew Prior’ when he was ostensibly on ‘business in Europe’ on behalf of his press. The preliminaries for the Treaty of Utrecht (April 1713), which had ended the War of the Spanish Succession, had been negotiated by Prior. He was treated with considerable suspicion by the Whigs (a British political party), and, after the fall of the Tory ministry (1714), was arrested for treason. If Tonson had been a spy however, he has been dismissed by his most recent biographer (Ophelia Field) as 'inept.'
Having said this, it is also of interest that the letter comes from such a high up European official. Tonson’s reputation in Great Britain was high, as can be seen from his association with men, including politicians and authors, who became members of the ‘Whig Kit Cat Club’ (an esteemed London literary and political group), which he founded. This example of his reputation in Europe was not without precedent however, as his edition of Dryden’s translation of The Works of Virgil (1697) was hotly anticipated by royalty and elites both in England, as well as on the continent. Addison even wrote to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz that “this Edition of this Book … will probably be the noblest volume that ever came from the English Press.”
Cumulatively, the correspondence surrounding the Tonsons sheds substantial light on the editorial and publishing practices of the most important and successful publishing house at the time. They show the level of connections and discourse going on in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century ... Few have heard of him today, but Jacob Tonson the elder (1656?-1736) was undoubtedly one of the most important booksellers in the history of English literature. He numbered Addison, Behn, Congreve, Dryden, Echard, Oldmixon, Prior, Steele, and ... http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/234153786/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/11/origin-black-friday-other-black-days/The origin of Black Friday and other Black Dayshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/x83FABE8gZw/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/232816142/_/oupbloghistory/#respondFri, 25 Nov 2016 12:30:21 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=119028Across the US, those who are not too replete with their Thanksgiving feast will be braving the crowds in order to secure themselves one of the bargains associated with Black Friday, the day following Thanksgiving which is often regarded as the first day of Christmas shopping in the US. Even on the [...]

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Across the US, those who are not too replete with their Thanksgiving feast will be braving the crowds in order to secure themselves one of the bargains associated with Black Friday, the day following Thanksgiving which is often regarded as the first day of Christmas shopping in the US. Even on the Thanksgiving-less shores of Britain, we are starting to see this tradition sneak in. Hunting down bargains is all well and good, but here at Oxford Dictionaries, we are much more interested in hunting down the histories of words. Which other Black days have been marked through history, and does Black used in this way always denote negativity?

Black Friday is seen as a day of huge profit in the world of retail, enough for some to have theorized that its origin is the day’s ability to take a company in debt, or in the red, and pull them back into the black. This origin story may make this the first Black day where the Black is seen to be bringing positive associations, although an earlier theory holds that the name is a reference to the congestion caused in city centres particularly in Philadelphia. This is nonetheless a step away from the disaster and ruin that has typically been carried by Black in this context. We explore the merits of these opposing theories in the video above.

When was the first Black Friday?

Though those working in customer services may wish that this year will be the last time we mark Black Friday, when was the first Black Friday? The earliest evidence for the term found by researchers at the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is from 1610. It will surprise no one to hear that this Black Friday had very little to do with sales, or Thanksgiving. The first Black Friday did not refer to a specific Friday, but rather was used in schools to refer to any Friday on which an exam fell. It is something of a comfort to know that, even in the 17thcentury, exams were regarded with that same familiar dread.

We have found no evidence from before 1951 of Black Friday referring to the day following Thanksgiving, and in this instance its sense was markedly different to how we use the term today. In this context, instead, the day was associated with staff absences from factories following the Thanksgiving holiday. The first citation found for Black Friday in the sense of the start of the Christmas shopping season comes ten years later, in 1961.

Which other Fridays have been Black?

The moniker has been attached to a number of different Fridays in the years between 1610 and 1951. The next one noted in the OED is Friday 6 December 1745, which was the date that the Young Pretender’s landing was announced in London. The Young Pretender was hardly a welcome visitor, but the extent to which his proximity caused panic across the capital is a matter of debate, but this panic—real or a tool of political spin—nonetheless earned the day its dark title.

The next date to be designated a Black Friday noted in the OED was again one of widespread panic: Friday 11 May 1866, saw the failure of the London banking house Overand, Gurney, & Co. On the very next day, it was reported in the Times, with some clairvoyance, that “The day will probably be long remembered in the city of London as the ‘Black Friday.’” This is the first sense of Black Friday with strong financial associations, and it seems these only grow stronger into the 20th century.

The third (and last) Black Friday listed in the OED happened just three years later, on Friday 24 September 1869, when the introduction of a large quantity of government gold into the financial market precipitated a day of financial panic on Wall Street. The mid to late 1860s saw the beginning of a dramatic climb in use of the term Black Friday in both British and US varieties of English, showing the impact of these events on the language.

This is the last Black Friday to be found in the OED, but not the last day to have gained the title in popular use. The majority of those following Black Friday of 1869 echo the sense of financial ruin, or the associations Black days also carry with loss of life.

Spreading around the world

In recent years, we can be fairly sure which of these many Black Fridays is the subject of discussion in our New Monitor corpus, as the term sees almost no use through the year, and then skyrockets in November, petering out rapidly in December, and so coinciding with only one Black Friday on the calendar. Interestingly, this holds true even for British English, and Englishes in other parts of the world, where Thanksgiving is not celebrated. Though the term is much more common in US English than in British English, its use in the US appears to be declining: November 2015 saw only two thirds as many instances of Black Friday in our corpus as November 2012. In contrast, use in British English is seeing a year on year increase, more than doubling between November 2012 and November 2013, and then seeing more than a 50% increase again between November 2013 and November 2014. It looks like the Brits might be catching up…

Black Monday, Black Tuesday, Black Wednesday…

Of course, Friday is not the only day to have found itself blackened. In fact, there is not a day of the week that has not earned its dark stripes through some disaster or other. The first day evidenced to have Black prefixed to it was a Monday, more specifically Easter Monday; a quotation referring to Easter Monday as Black Monday has been found as early as 1389. There are a few competing theories for what caused the day to be so named. One historical theory holds that the name refers to a severe storm on Easter Monday in 1360, which led to the deaths of many soldiers of Edward III’s army during the Hundred Years’ War. A different historical theory purports that Black Monday is a reference to the massacre of English settlers in Dublin by the Irish on Easter Monday 1209. The name may be unrelated to either event, and may instead be linked to a general belief in the unlucky character of Mondays, possibly influenced in this case by the view that misfortune will naturally follow a celebration like that of Easter Sunday.

The next Black Monday, first quoted in the OED as far back as 1735, echoes our first Black Friday; this was school slang referring to the first day of term following a vacation. The mindset of the pupils bleakly returning to the classroom is readily recognizable and easy to imagine.

A third Black Monday—and the final one to have been noted in the OED—is affixed to a specific date: Monday 19 October 1987, which is the day of a world stock market crash. This reflects the wider trend of days of great financial disaster being marked as Black. Black Wednesday is used to refer to the 16 September 1992, when there was a great surge in sales of the pound. And the Wall Street Crash of 1929 was so disastrous as to leave two days painted black in its wake: Black Thursday, 24 October 1929, which marked the first day of panic selling on the New York Stock Exchange; and Black Tuesday, the following week, which is widely regarded as the day the stock market crashed.

The most recent day to be referred to as Black Saturday in the OED was Saturday 4 August 1621, when the articles of Perth were ratified while a brutal storm cast its shadow over the day. Almost a century earlier, the first Black Saturday—and also the first Black day in the OED attached to a specific date—took place on Saturday 10 September 1547, denoting the day of the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, which saw Scotland catastrophically defeated.

The advent of Cyber Monday

Though not a Black day in itself, Cyber Monday follows Black Friday both on the calendar, and in word formation. Cyber Monday takes the traditional bargains of Black Friday to an online environment, but does it leave behind the last remnants of negativity that Black Friday is carrying? Perhaps not: of the first ten noun collocates of cyber that our Oxford English Corpus finds, only two are either positive or neutral (security; café). The other eight (including criminal, attack, and bullying) are all negative. This suggests that cyber might not be carrying the happiest connotations along with it, though it is doubtless an improvement on the memories of failed battles and financial collapse that cling to Black Friday.

Given the cyber nature of Cyber Monday, it might be expected that it is more international than Black Friday. So far, this does not seem the case: use of Cyber Monday in our New Monitor Corpus is still overwhelmingly US in origin, although its use in US English seems to be in decline, while its use in other varieties is climbing. This mirrors the trends we saw earlier with Black Friday, suggesting that taking place online is not a major factor in making Cyber Monday a globally recognized event. If it continues to follow on in the footsteps of Black Friday, we may find ourselves fighting it out digitally as well as in the shops in order to grab the best bargains for Christmas.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/232816142/_/oupbloghistory/feed/0History,*Featured,black days,Cyber Monday,origin of black friday,Christmas shopping,Europe,Black Friday,British English,US English,America,oxford english dictionary,Dictionaries & Lexicography,OxfordWords blog,New Monitor Corpus,online environment,economy,stock market crash,Thanksgiving,oedAcross the US, those who are not too replete with their Thanksgiving feast will be braving the crowds in order to secure themselves one of the bargains associated with Black Friday, the day following Thanksgiving which is often regarded as the first day of Christmas shopping in the US. Even on the Thanksgiving-less shores of Britain, we are starting to see this tradition sneak in. Hunting down bargains is all well and good, but here at Oxford Dictionaries, we are much more interested in hunting down the histories of words. Which other Black days have been marked through history, and does Black used in this way always denote negativity?
Black Friday is seen as a day of huge profit in the world of retail, enough for some to have theorized that its origin is the day’s ability to take a company in debt, or in the red, and pull them back into the black. This origin story may make this the first Black day where the Black is seen to be bringing positive associations, although an earlier theory holds that the name is a reference to the congestion caused in city centres particularly in Philadelphia. This is nonetheless a step away from the disaster and ruin that has typically been carried by Black in this context. We explore the merits of these opposing theories in the video above.
When was the first Black Friday?
Though those working in customer services may wish that this year will be the last time we mark Black Friday, when was the first Black Friday? The earliest evidence for the term found by researchers at the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is from 1610. It will surprise no one to hear that this Black Friday had very little to do with sales, or Thanksgiving. The first Black Friday did not refer to a specific Friday, but rather was used in schools to refer to any Friday on which an exam fell. It is something of a comfort to know that, even in the 17thcentury, exams were regarded with that same familiar dread.
We have found no evidence from before 1951 of Black Friday referring to the day following Thanksgiving, and in this instance its sense was markedly different to how we use the term today. In this context, instead, the day was associated with staff absences from factories following the Thanksgiving holiday. The first citation found for Black Friday in the sense of the start of the Christmas shopping season comes ten years later, in 1961.
Which other Fridays have been Black?
The moniker has been attached to a number of different Fridays in the years between 1610 and 1951. The next one noted in the OED is Friday 6 December 1745, which was the date that the Young Pretender’s landing was announced in London. The Young Pretender was hardly a welcome visitor, but the extent to which his proximity caused panic across the capital is a matter of debate, but this panic—real or a tool of political spin—nonetheless earned the day its dark title.
The next date to be designated a Black Friday noted in the OED was again one of widespread panic: Friday 11 May 1866, saw the failure of the London banking house Overand, Gurney, & Co. On the very next day, it was reported in the Times, with some clairvoyance, that “The day will probably be long remembered in the city of London as the ‘Black Friday.’” This is the first sense of Black Friday with strong financial associations, and it seems these only grow stronger into the 20th century.
The third (and last) Black Friday listed in the OED happened just three years later, on Friday 24 September 1869, when the introduction of a large quantity of government gold into the financial market precipitated a day of financial panic on Wall Street. The mid to late 1860s saw the beginning of a dramatic climb in use of the term Black Friday in both British and US varieties of English, showing the impact of these events on the language.
This is the last Black Friday to be found in the OED, but not the last day to have gained ... Across the US, those who are not too replete with their Thanksgiving feast will be braving the crowds in order to secure themselves one of the bargains associated with Black Friday, the day following Thanksgiving which is often regarded as the first ... http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/232816142/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/11/a-note-of-thanks-oha-2016/A note of thanks, a dose of sanityhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/j1xbHmxzKck/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/232759156/_/oupbloghistory/#respondFri, 25 Nov 2016 10:30:10 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=1261462016 has had far more than its share of horribleness. Many of us are ready to leave this year far behind, even as we’re terrified of what the coming years may bring. At a time when many people are being told that their voices and lives don’t matter, we think oral historians have a vital role to play in amplifying silenced voices and helping us all imagine a better future.

Related Stories

2016 has had far more than its share of horribleness. Many of us are ready to leave this year far behind, even as we’re terrified of what the coming years may bring. At a time when many people are being told that their voices and lives don’t matter, we think oral historians have a vital role to play in amplifying silenced voices and helping us all imagine a better future. Before we say goodbye to 2016, Troy Reeves reflects back on some of the moments in which the support of friends, colleagues, and even strangers throughout the oral history world has helped to make the present survivable and the future imaginable.

Well, it has been a difficult twelve months. Andrew Shaffer and I both saw our mothers suffer through cancer diagnoses and recovery. We are both immensely thankful for those tasked with helping our mothers’ diagnoses and operations, and who assist with their continued convalescence. And I’m thankful for Andrew for carrying on with the social media during a difficult summer and fall.

I lost my father in July, and our Editor-in-Chief Kathy Nasstrom lost both her parents this summer. As we helped each other through our loss, we grew closer, which I did not think possible. So, I’m extremely thankful for Kathy, not only as the best damn developmental editor in the business but also as one of my best damn colleagues.

On top of that stress, the Oral History Association lost several key members in the last year. The organization’s executive director, Cliff Kuhn, passed away last November. And we lost long-time and well-known scholars Horacio Roque Ramírez and Leslie Brown since the 2015 OHA Annual Meeting in Tampa.

So, when #OHA2016—our 50th Annual Meeting titled OHA@50—commenced last month in Long Beach, the feeling of loss weighed heavily on me. But when I got there, my colleagues reminded me that family does not mean just blood. And they offered a shoulder for me to cry on.

So along with my extended family—my in-laws and “laws”—I’m truly madly deeply thankful for my OHA family. Some of them I have known since my first OHA (Anchorage, 1999) some I just met, or really got to know, in the last couple years. All of them offer more to me in terms of advice, support, friendship, than I can give in return. To list them all here would serve little purpose; they know who they are.

I’m also quite thankful for the aforementioned venue, the OHA Annual Meeting, for furnishing all of us a place to meet and discuss all the myriad aspects of our profession. Thanks here can focus on a few, specifically Gayle Knight and Kristine Navarro-McElhaney, as well as the program and local arrangement committee members; I will rank this year’s conference as one of my favorites as well as most memorable. A shout out must go, too, to the Mentoring Committee; they have forced me to meet someone new the last two years, which all long-time conference attendees need.

In advance of OHA@50, Andrew and I, with the help of OHA leadership, asked my aforementioned oral history family to state why they love the OHA and/or its Annual Meeting. We listed some of them last month. I won’t bore you with mine, at least not in its entirety. But this year in Long Beach, #OHA2016 was indeed my yearly dose of sanity. While it sounds cliché to say it, in my case it rings true: I’m not sure what I’d have done without it.

Featured image credit: Thank you by Free for Commercial Use. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/232759156/_/oupbloghistory/feed/0History,Cliff Kuhn,*Featured,Oral History Review,Journals,OHA,Arts & Humanities,Kathy Nasstrom,OHA@50,The Oral History Review,Troy Reeves,Andrew Shaffer,oral history association,Oral History,Oral History Association Annual Meeting,oral history2016 has had far more than its share of horribleness. Many of us are ready to leave this year far behind, even as we’re terrified of what the coming years may bring. At a time when many people are being told that their voices and lives don’t matter, we think oral historians have a vital role to play in amplifying silenced voices and helping us all imagine a better future. Before we say goodbye to 2016, Troy Reeves reflects back on some of the moments in which the support of friends, colleagues, and even strangers throughout the oral history world has helped to make the present survivable and the future imaginable.
Well, it has been a difficult twelve months. Andrew Shaffer and I both saw our mothers suffer through cancer diagnoses and recovery. We are both immensely thankful for those tasked with helping our mothers’ diagnoses and operations, and who assist with their continued convalescence. And I’m thankful for Andrew for carrying on with the social media during a difficult summer and fall.
I lost my father in July, and our Editor-in-Chief Kathy Nasstrom lost both her parents this summer. As we helped each other through our loss, we grew closer, which I did not think possible. So, I’m extremely thankful for Kathy, not only as the best damn developmental editor in the business but also as one of my best damn colleagues.
On top of that stress, the Oral History Association lost several key members in the last year. The organization’s executive director, Cliff Kuhn, passed away last November. And we lost long-time and well-known scholars Horacio Roque Ramírez and Leslie Brown since the 2015 OHA Annual Meeting in Tampa.
So, when #OHA2016—our 50th Annual Meeting titled OHA@50—commenced last month in Long Beach, the feeling of loss weighed heavily on me. But when I got there, my colleagues reminded me that family does not mean just blood. And they offered a shoulder for me to cry on.
So along with my extended family—my in-laws and “laws”—I’m truly madly deeply thankful for my OHA family. Some of them I have known since my first OHA (Anchorage, 1999) some I just met, or really got to know, in the last couple years. All of them offer more to me in terms of advice, support, friendship, than I can give in return. To list them all here would serve little purpose; they know who they are.
I’m also quite thankful for the aforementioned venue, the OHA Annual Meeting, for furnishing all of us a place to meet and discuss all the myriad aspects of our profession. Thanks here can focus on a few, specifically Gayle Knight and Kristine Navarro-McElhaney, as well as the program and local arrangement committee members; I will rank this year’s conference as one of my favorites as well as most memorable. A shout out must go, too, to the Mentoring Committee; they have forced me to meet someone new the last two years, which all long-time conference attendees need.
In advance of OHA@50, Andrew and I, with the help of OHA leadership, asked my aforementioned oral history family to state why they love the OHA and/or its Annual Meeting. We listed some of them last month. I won’t bore you with mine, at least not in its entirety. But this year in Long Beach, #OHA2016 was indeed my yearly dose of sanity. While it sounds cliché to say it, in my case it rings true: I’m not sure what I’d have done without it.
Featured image credit: Thank you by Free for Commercial Use. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.
The post A note of thanks, a dose of sanity appeared first on OUPblog. 2016 has had far more than its share of horribleness. Many of us are ready to leave this year far behind, even as we’re terrified of what the coming years may bring. At a time when many people are being told that their voices and lives ... http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/232759156/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/11/year-hating-immigrants-refugees/The year of hating immigrantshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/ZDitdwvEya4/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/232707446/_/oupbloghistory/#respondFri, 25 Nov 2016 08:30:44 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=1251992016 has been a year of bitter political debates fueled in large part by drastic divides regarding how immigrants affect national well-being. The US presidential race, the British Brexit vote and other challenges within the European Union, and growing competition against the otherwise durable German Chancellor Angela Merkel all display deeply rooted fears of inadequately controlled immigration.

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2016 has been a year of bitter political debates fueled in large part by drastic divides regarding how immigrants affect national well-being. The US presidential race, the British Brexit vote, as well as other challenges within the European Union, and growing competition against the otherwise durable German Chancellor Angela Merkel all display deeply rooted fears of inadequately controlled immigration. New immigrants are blamed for the steady erosion of economic conditions for the working-classes; disintegrating cultural and social norms; and rising crime rates and threats of terrorist attacks. Politicians who call for the securing of national borders and eviction of targeted groups of newer immigrants have attracted vocal and vehement supporters.

The appeal of such slogans is obvious, if one considers that regulating immigration is one of the most direct ways by which countries can socially engineer their populations to gain advantages of all sorts. These days, immigration laws generally welcome immigrants who are believed most likely to contribute economically because they bear useful skills, educational credentials, entrepreneurial energies, and investment capital. Ideally, immigrants would also share political values and be readily absorbed socially and culturally, although laws that select for such attributes may invoke unacceptable forms of discrimination, as in Republican president elect Donald Trump’s call to ban immigration of Muslims.

Almost no one believes that borders should be completely open, although there is wide disagreement about what rationales should take priority in limiting who can immigrate legally and who can gain citizenship. Should we really prioritize economic migrants? What of people fleeing instability and danger in their homelands—do they have rights to safe passage and new homes as refugees? How do immigrants affect the common good in terms of costs to social services weighed against their economic contributions? How is assimilability measured, and how much and what kinds of diversity can be accommodated into democratic societies?

Disagreements about what priorities immigration restrictions should advance are compounded by the reality that immigration laws have proven almost impossible to enforce completely, fanning fears that unauthorized immigrants are ignoring and undermining national interests.

In this fraught climate, the human realities of those who migrate often disappear from view. Whether they cross borders for economic or political reasons, migrants display high levels of aspiration in the risks and sacrifices they undertake in search of better lives. They leave behind loved ones and familiar homes for uncertain futures, often paying large sums of moneys to brokers who manage their travel, drawn by hopes that their living conditions will improve whether through better job or business opportunities, greater safety, freedom from persecution, environment, or reunification with family and friends. They are usually driven more than most to succeed precisely because they have given up so much in migrating and are prepared to work hard and undertake employment shunned by others in order to do so.

Whether they cross borders for economic or political reasons, migrants display high levels of aspiration in the risks and sacrifices they undertake in search of better lives.

As a scholar of migration, I write histories of migration that try to strike a balance between the lived realities of migrants, both legal and unauthorized, and the legal and bureaucratic conditions imposed by the nations in which they travel. I have found that immigration laws become more effective when they work with, rather than against, the ambitions of migrants seeking better lives. Channeling their considerable energies and dreams can produce mutual benefit both for their countries of new settlement and for themselves, rather than pitting the two forces in costly and dehumanizing opposition.

Asian Americans became model minorities even though they had been the earliest targets of enforced immigration restriction in the United States, and banned from citizenship for most of US history (1790-1952) because they were viewed as racially inassimilable. Nonetheless, Asians continued to immigrate and made lives for themselves in the process of helping to develop the United States through railroads, farms, fisheries, a plethora of businesses large and small, trade, education, and many forms of civil service. During World War II, laws and attitudes began to shift so that such racial discrimination became unacceptable. With the normalizing of Asian immigration and access to citizenship, numbers grew, as did the high visibility of “model minority” Asian Americans. Most have immigrated through employment preferences in the 1965 Immigration Act, now just past its 50th anniversary, which selects for Asian immigrants trained and educated for professional, entrepreneurial, and white-collar livelihoods and success. That Asian Americans in the aggregate have such high levels of employment and educational attainment demonstrates the power of laws and bureaucracies to screen for “highly skilled” immigrants who succeed economically, but also to brand as illegal and invasive those who share many of the same aspirational traits and capacities to gain employment, but don’t fit into legislatively imposed categories of welcome immigrants.

Featured image credit: Statue of Liberty Landmark by Unsplash. Public domain via Pixabay.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/232707446/_/oupbloghistory/feed/0History,refugees,*Featured,Very Short Introductions,World,2016 presidential election,citizenship,ethnic minorities,Asian American History: A Very Short Introduction,brexit,Angela Merkel,VSI,Asian American History,Madeline Y. Hsu,Donald Trump,migration,Politics,immigration,discrimination2016 has been a year of bitter political debates fueled in large part by drastic divides regarding how immigrants affect national well-being. The US presidential race, the British Brexit vote, as well as other challenges within the European Union, and growing competition against the otherwise durable German Chancellor Angela Merkel all display deeply rooted fears of inadequately controlled immigration. New immigrants are blamed for the steady erosion of economic conditions for the working-classes; disintegrating cultural and social norms; and rising crime rates and threats of terrorist attacks. Politicians who call for the securing of national borders and eviction of targeted groups of newer immigrants have attracted vocal and vehement supporters.
The appeal of such slogans is obvious, if one considers that regulating immigration is one of the most direct ways by which countries can socially engineer their populations to gain advantages of all sorts. These days, immigration laws generally welcome immigrants who are believed most likely to contribute economically because they bear useful skills, educational credentials, entrepreneurial energies, and investment capital. Ideally, immigrants would also share political values and be readily absorbed socially and culturally, although laws that select for such attributes may invoke unacceptable forms of discrimination, as in Republican president elect Donald Trump’s call to ban immigration of Muslims.
Almost no one believes that borders should be completely open, although there is wide disagreement about what rationales should take priority in limiting who can immigrate legally and who can gain citizenship. Should we really prioritize economic migrants? What of people fleeing instability and danger in their homelands—do they have rights to safe passage and new homes as refugees? How do immigrants affect the common good in terms of costs to social services weighed against their economic contributions? How is assimilability measured, and how much and what kinds of diversity can be accommodated into democratic societies?
Disagreements about what priorities immigration restrictions should advance are compounded by the reality that immigration laws have proven almost impossible to enforce completely, fanning fears that unauthorized immigrants are ignoring and undermining national interests.
In this fraught climate, the human realities of those who migrate often disappear from view. Whether they cross borders for economic or political reasons, migrants display high levels of aspiration in the risks and sacrifices they undertake in search of better lives. They leave behind loved ones and familiar homes for uncertain futures, often paying large sums of moneys to brokers who manage their travel, drawn by hopes that their living conditions will improve whether through better job or business opportunities, greater safety, freedom from persecution, environment, or reunification with family and friends. They are usually driven more than most to succeed precisely because they have given up so much in migrating and are prepared to work hard and undertake employment shunned by others in order to do so. Whether they cross borders for economic or political reasons, migrants display high levels of aspiration in the risks and sacrifices they undertake in search of better lives.
As a scholar of migration, I write histories of migration that try to strike a balance between the lived realities of migrants, both legal and unauthorized, and the legal and bureaucratic conditions imposed by the nations in which they travel. I have found that immigration laws become more effective when they work with, rather than against, the ambitions of migrants seeking better lives. Channeling their considerable energies and dreams can produce mutual benefit both for their countries of new settlement and for themselves, rather than pitting the two forces in costly and dehumanizing ... 2016 has been a year of bitter political debates fueled in large part by drastic divides regarding how immigrants affect national well-being. The US presidential race, the British Brexit vote, as well as other challenges within the European Union, ... http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/232707446/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/11/thanksgiving-english-language/The many ‘sides’ of Thanksgiving…and the English languagehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/XK_qm0_ru98/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/232171794/_/oupbloghistory/#commentsThu, 24 Nov 2016 11:30:11 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=119047We may talk a lot of turkey during the holiday, but US Thanksgiving is really all about the sides. Yes, we pile our plates with mashed potatoes and green beans, but we also feast on the many other great sides the English language has to offer.

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We may talk a lot of turkey during the holiday, but US Thanksgiving is really all about the sides. Yes, we pile our plates with mashed potatoes and green beans, but we also feast on the many other great sides the English language has to offer.

From all sides

During the holiday, both sides of a family may gather together out in a relative’s home in the countryside. The cook may serve up food on a sideboard, with the stuffing cooked on the inside of the bird.

At dinner, some may takesides of a political controversy, while others may just stay on the sidelines – of the American football game on TV, that is, where a ref may flag a player who is offside.

A distant aunt may pull an unsuspecting nephew aside for some colorful side comments. That’s better than her husband, who corners a cousin about the new siding on his house.

Besides the family drama, too much food will split sides, as will the convivial laughter. Celebrants can cap the meal with a postprandial snooze: How about sideways on the sofarightby the fireside? The drowsiness is surely just a side effect of all the turkey’s tryptophan – not the booze, of course!

Inside side

English really dishes up the sides. This may not be surprising, as the word has had a lot of time to develop in the language: the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) dates side back to Old English, when, much as now, it named the sides of the body.

Side has many cognates in the Germanic languages, but its ultimate origins are unclear. Proposing a Proto-Germanic root, philologist Walter Skeat has suggested an earlier, literal meaning of ‘that which is extended.’ This is possibly connected to another early side in Old English, this one meaning ‘long’ and ‘spacious.’

Let’s have a look at – er, taste of – some other particularly interesting side words in English.

Side notes

If we have a hard time paying attention, we might easily get sidetracked. This term is derived from the 19th-century side-tracks of railroads.

If we want to avoid a touchy topic, we might sidestep it in a conversation, a word first recorded in military marches near the backside, shall we say, of the 1700s. In such a conversation, we might digress with many sidebars, which US journalists were using by the late 1940s to refer to articles secondary to the feature story in a newspaper; the figurative sense was in place by the early 1950s.

A sideshow may have been – no hoax – a coinage of the great showman P.T. Barnum. He refers to it as a ‘temporary enterprise’ alongside his main attraction, as the OED first records the word in 1855.

A sidekick is also first found in American English. It’s back-formed from side-kicker, documented at least by the start of the 1900s for a ‘close but lesser pal.’ The kick may originally have meant “to walk or wander,” yielding to kick around or kick about.

Another stateside word is sideburns. This facial hair is named after Ambrose Burnside, an American Civil War general noted for the particular way he groomed his whiskers. Here, the OED quotes the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1875: “His whisker was of the Burnside type, consisting of mustache and ‘muttonchop,’ the chin being perfectly clean.”

Maybe you recall that records had A-sides and B-sides? Another term for the B-side was the flip side, dated to the late 1940s. The B-side typically featured the lesser track(s) of a recording, although on theflip side lives on as a positive consideration of some matter.

Like flip side, we can also speak of the upside or downside of some event. While upside and downside have long been in the language, these substantive usages for ‘advantage’ and ‘disadvantage,’ respectively, trace back to the early 20th century, when they were used to describe the movement of share prices in the stock market.

Upside down is far older, at least in sense. The OED dates it back to the 1300s, but the phrase took a different form early on: up so down. Speakers shaped the word into upset down and upside down, which stuck, since the usage of so was unusual, the OED explains.

Sidle, ‘to edge sideways,’ also features some curious linguistic changes at work. The verb is actually a back-formation of sideling, which was an adverb meaning ‘sideways’ but whose -ing sounds like the progressive tense or a present participle in English. In the word sideling, however, this -ing is actually part of -ling, an old adverbial suffix in the language. Not to be left out, -ling got confused with -long, another adverbial suffix seen in sidelong.

Sports fans, especially of American football, may well be familiar with blindsided. As the OED notes, the term, deriving from blind side, actually dates back to the very early 1600s, referring to the ‘weak side of a person or thing.’ Bedside manner may also strike some as a relatively new phenomenon, but it is in fact recorded by the mid-1800s.

Finally, two words that are surprisingly younger than many may suppose are insider and outsider. Insider is documented by 1848 (and in the context of the stock exchanges), which makes it roughly contemporary to sunny side.

In a recent observation made by lexicographer Peter Sokolowski, outsider, has been spiking in the American language due to the political outsider status some Republican Party presidential candidates are touting. Sokolowski also noted it appearsin1800 in a letter by Jane Austen (the OED attests this, too), referring to some outsiders to a card game.

But like gravy, many like to keep their politics on the side on Thanksgiving.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/232171794/_/oupbloghistory/feed/1History,Old English,*Featured,jane austen,english language,American traditions,P.T. Barnum,Republican Party presidential candidates,american football,Language,etymology,oxford english dictionary,Dictionaries & Lexicography,OxfordWords blog,political outsider,Oral History,word origin,American holiday,ThanksgivingWe may talk a lot of turkey during the holiday, but US Thanksgiving is really all about the sides. Yes, we pile our plates with mashed potatoes and green beans, but we also feast on the many other great sides the English language has to offer.
From all sides
During the holiday, both sides of a family may gather together out in a relative’s home in the countryside. The cook may serve up food on a sideboard, with the stuffing cooked on the inside of the bird.
At dinner, some may take sides of a political controversy, while others may just stay on the sidelines – of the American football game on TV, that is, where a ref may flag a player who is offside.
A distant aunt may pull an unsuspecting nephew aside for some colorful side comments. That’s better than her husband, who corners a cousin about the new siding on his house.
Besides the family drama, too much food will split sides, as will the convivial laughter. Celebrants can cap the meal with a postprandial snooze: How about sideways on the sofa right by the fireside? The drowsiness is surely just a side effect of all the turkey’s tryptophan – not the booze, of course!
Inside side
English really dishes up the sides. This may not be surprising, as the word has had a lot of time to develop in the language: the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) dates side back to Old English, when, much as now, it named the sides of the body.
Side has many cognates in the Germanic languages, but its ultimate origins are unclear. Proposing a Proto-Germanic root, philologist Walter Skeat has suggested an earlier, literal meaning of ‘that which is extended.’ This is possibly connected to another early side in Old English, this one meaning ‘long’ and ‘spacious.’
Let’s have a look at – er, taste of – some other particularly interesting side words in English.
Side notes
If we have a hard time paying attention, we might easily get sidetracked. This term is derived from the 19th-century side-tracks of railroads.
If we want to avoid a touchy topic, we might sidestep it in a conversation, a word first recorded in military marches near the backside, shall we say, of the 1700s. In such a conversation, we might digress with many sidebars, which US journalists were using by the late 1940s to refer to articles secondary to the feature story in a newspaper; the figurative sense was in place by the early 1950s.
A sideshow may have been – no hoax – a coinage of the great showman P.T. Barnum. He refers to it as a ‘temporary enterprise’ alongside his main attraction, as the OED first records the word in 1855.
A sidekick is also first found in American English. It’s back-formed from side-kicker, documented at least by the start of the 1900s for a ‘close but lesser pal.’ The kick may originally have meant “to walk or wander,” yielding to kick around or kick about.
Another stateside word is sideburns. This facial hair is named after Ambrose Burnside, an American Civil War general noted for the particular way he groomed his whiskers. Here, the OED quotes the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1875: “His whisker was of the Burnside type, consisting of mustache and ‘muttonchop,’ the chin being perfectly clean.”
Maybe you recall ... We may talk a lot of turkey during the holiday, but US Thanksgiving is really all about the sides. Yes, we pile our plates with mashed potatoes and green beans, but we also feast on the many other great http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/232171794/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/11/black-friday-facts-origins/5 facts about Black Fridayhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/16OYSdnLC3Q/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/231514544/_/oupbloghistory/#commentsWed, 23 Nov 2016 10:30:49 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=126083From an economics standpoint, Black Friday is one of the most important days of the year, as it marks the unofficial start of the busy holiday shopping season. The origin of the term “Black Friday,” however, is not entirely straightforward. We’ve compiled a list of some of the most common explanations for how this infamously chaotic day got its name.

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As families across the United States gather to celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow, one thing will be on the mind of savvy, deal-hunting shoppers more than turkey, parade floats, football, or even pumpkin pie–Black Friday.

Malls and retail centers of all sizes and specialties will soon be swarmed from corner to corner with people–many who lined up at the entrance well before the stroke of midnight–looking to snag the best deals of the year on nearly every product imaginable.

From an economics standpoint, Black Friday is one of the most important days of the year, as it marks the unofficial start of the busy holiday shopping season. The origin of the term “Black Friday,” however, is not entirely straightforward. We’ve compiled a list of some of the 5 most common explanations for how this infamously chaotic day got its name.

As far back as the 17th century, students used the term Black Friday as part of schoolyard slang to refer to exam days. As such, the day was “characterized by tragic or disastrous events; causing despair or pessimism,” according to one definition from the Oxford Dictionaries.

When referring to a specific day, “black” has historically been used as a general term marking a collapse in prices. For example, Friday 24 September, 1869 is also referred to as Black Friday. On this day, President Ulysses S. Grant released all government-held gold for sale in order to curb the efforts of those trying to corner the country’s gold market. As a result, the price of gold plummeted and a stock market panic was created. In addition, the Wall Street Crash on Tuesday, 29 October, 1929–also referred to as Black Tuesday–ultimately caused the Great Depression.

One of the most prevalent explanations of the name Black Friday is that it refers to the first day of the year businesses make a profit, otherwise known as being “in the black” as opposed to “in the red.” In traditional, handwritten bookkeeping practices, an account’s credit was written in black ink, and debit was written in red.

In Philadelphia in the 1960s, the day after Thanksgiving came to be known as Black Friday in reference to the heavy traffic congestion that shoppers caused as they traveled to the city’s retail centers. As a result, public transportation workers and police officers faced difficulties managing the large crowds, and often worked long hours.

Retailers nationwide began turning Black Friday into the holiday shopping extravaganza it is today during the 1980s, offering steep discounts as a way to draw in crowds of eager Americans–and their wallets. Since then, Black Friday has continued to evolve past a single day of sales, spurring the creation and increasing popularity of Brown Thursday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday.

No matter the truest origin of the term Black Friday, the day continues to attract massive crowds of consumers each year, spurring a positive boost for our nation’s economy. In fact, it is estimated that 137.4 million people plan to shop this weekend, totaling 59% of all Americans!

Are you planning to shop on Black Friday this year?

Featured image:Boxing Day at the Toronto Eaton Centre by 松林 L. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/231514544/_/oupbloghistory/feed/1*Featured,Cyber Monday,Retail,Christmas shopping,Black Friday,black tuesday,american history,America,holidays,oxford english dictionary,wall street crash,Social Sciences,Kelly Crupi,Oxford Economics,Business & Economics,american economics,American holiday,Thanksgiving,The Great DepressionAs families across the United States gather to celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow, one thing will be on the mind of savvy, deal-hunting shoppers more than turkey, parade floats, football, or even pumpkin pie–Black Friday.
Malls and retail centers of all sizes and specialties will soon be swarmed from corner to corner with people–many who lined up at the entrance well before the stroke of midnight–looking to snag the best deals of the year on nearly every product imaginable.
From an economics standpoint, Black Friday is one of the most important days of the year, as it marks the unofficial start of the busy holiday shopping season. The origin of the term “Black Friday,” however, is not entirely straightforward. We’ve compiled a list of some of the 5 most common explanations for how this infamously chaotic day got its name.
- As far back as the 17th century, students used the term Black Friday as part of schoolyard slang to refer to exam days. As such, the day was “characterized by tragic or disastrous events; causing despair or pessimism,” according to one definition from the Oxford Dictionaries. - When referring to a specific day, “black” has historically been used as a general term marking a collapse in prices. For example, Friday 24 September, 1869 is also referred to as Black Friday. On this day, President Ulysses S. Grant released all government-held gold for sale in order to curb the efforts of those trying to corner the country’s gold market. As a result, the price of gold plummeted and a stock market panic was created. In addition, the Wall Street Crash on Tuesday, 29 October, 1929–also referred to as Black Tuesday–ultimately caused the Great Depression. Todo mundo fazendo black friday… by v1ctor casale. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr. - One of the most prevalent explanations of the name Black Friday is that it refers to the first day of the year businesses make a profit, otherwise known as being “in the black” as opposed to “in the red.” In traditional, handwritten bookkeeping practices, an account’s credit was written in black ink, and debit was written in red. - In Philadelphia in the 1960s, the day after Thanksgiving came to be known as Black Friday in reference to the heavy traffic congestion that shoppers caused as they traveled to the city’s retail centers. As a result, public transportation workers and police officers faced difficulties managing the large crowds, and often worked long hours. - Retailers nationwide began turning Black Friday into the holiday shopping extravaganza it is today during the 1980s, offering steep discounts as a way to draw in crowds of eager Americans–and their wallets. Since then, Black Friday has continued to evolve past a single day of sales, spurring the creation and increasing popularity of Brown Thursday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday.
No matter the truest origin of the term Black Friday, the day continues to attract massive crowds of consumers each year, spurring a positive boost for our nation’s economy. In fact, it is estimated that 137.4 million people plan to shop this weekend, totaling 59% of all Americans!
Are you planning to shop on Black Friday this year?
Featured image:Boxing Day at the Toronto Eaton Centre by 松林 L. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The post 5 facts about Black Friday appeared first on OUPblog. As families across the United States gather to celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow, one thing will be on the mind of savvy, deal-hunting shoppers more than turkey, parade floats, football, or even pumpkin pie–Black Friday.http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/231514544/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/11/life-samuel-pepys/The life and times of Samuel Pepyshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/J7Z2heLHgHM/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/231489362/_/oupbloghistory/#commentsWed, 23 Nov 2016 09:30:29 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=125577Samuel Pepys penned his famous diaries between January 1660, and May of 1669. During the course of this nine year period, England witnessed some of the most important events in its political and social history. The diaries are over a million words long and recount in minute and often incredibly personal detail, events such as the restoration of the monarchy, the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the Great Fire, and Great Plague of London.

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Samuel Pepys penned his famous diaries between January 1660 and the end of May 1669. During the course of this nine year period, England witnessed some of the most important events in its political and social history. The diaries are over a million words long and recount in minute and often incredibly personal detail events such as the restoration of the monarchy, the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the Great Fire, and Great Plague of London. By detailing his daily life with such frankness (Pepys never anticipated his diaries to be so publicly scrutinized) he provided an unprecedented window into the everyday experiences of seventeenth century Londoners as well as major political events.

Find out more about key events in the life of Samuel Pepys with this interactive timeline — from his comments on the coronation of Charles II to his scathing review of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and from the chaos of the Great Fire of London to the devastation left by the Plague.

Featured image credit: ‘The burning of the English fleet off Chatham, 20 June 1667’ by Peter van den Velde, from the Rijks Museum. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/231489362/_/oupbloghistory/feed/1History,*Featured,london,Anglo-Dutch War,restoration,The Diary of Samuel Pepys,Great Fire of London,Timelines,shakespeare,english civil war,Arts & Humanities,diary,charles I,Great Plague,Europe,a midsummer night's dream,Raid on the Medway,Online products,Diarist,Oliver Cromwell,charles ii,Samuel PepysSamuel Pepys penned his famous diaries between January 1660 and the end of May 1669. During the course of this nine year period, England witnessed some of the most important events in its political and social history. The diaries are over a million words long and recount in minute and often incredibly personal detail events such as the restoration of the monarchy, the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the Great Fire, and Great Plague of London. By detailing his daily life with such frankness (Pepys never anticipated his diaries to be so publicly scrutinized) he provided an unprecedented window into the everyday experiences of seventeenth century Londoners as well as major political events.
Find out more about key events in the life of Samuel Pepys with this interactive timeline — from his comments on the coronation of Charles II to his scathing review of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and from the chaos of the Great Fire of London to the devastation left by the Plague.
Featured image credit: ‘The burning of the English fleet off Chatham, 20 June 1667’ by Peter van den Velde, from the Rijks Museum. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The post The life and times of Samuel Pepys appeared first on OUPblog. Samuel Pepys penned his famous diaries between January 1660 and the end of May 1669. During the course of this nine year period, England witnessed some of the most important events in its political and social history. The diaries are over a million ... http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/231489362/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/11/bible-influenced-founding-fathers/How the Bible influenced the Founding Fathershttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/pakZkQOVMC8/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/231466804/_/oupbloghistory/#commentsWed, 23 Nov 2016 08:30:58 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=125295In the midst of political campaigns, including the last election season, one often hears appeals to the American founding principles and the political visions of the founding fathers. Which political traditions and thinkers shaped the ideas and aspirations of the American founding?

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In the midst of political campaigns, including the last election season, one often hears appeals to the American founding principles and the political visions of the founding fathers.

Which political traditions and thinkers shaped the ideas and aspirations of the American founding? Late eighteenth-century Americans were influenced by diverse perspectives, including British constitutionalism, classical and civic republicanism, and Enlightenment liberalism. Among the works frequently said to have influenced the founders are John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, and William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.

Another, often overlooked or discounted source of influence is the Bible. Its expansive influence on the political culture of the age should not surprise us because the population was overwhelming Protestant, and it informed significant aspects of public culture, including language, letters, education, and law. No book at the time was more accessible or familiar than the English Bible, specifically the King James Bible. And the people were biblically literate.

The discourse of the era amply documents the founders’ many quotations from and allusions to both familiar and obscure biblical texts, confirming that they knew the Bible from cover to cover. Biblical language and themes liberally seasoned their rhetoric. The phrases and cadences of the King James Bible influenced their written and spoken words. Its ideas shaped their habits of mind and informed their political experiment in republican self-government.

The Bible left its mark on their political culture. Following an extensive survey of American political literature from 1760 to 1805, political scientist Donald S. Lutz reported that the Bible was cited more frequently than any European writer or even any European school of thought, such as Enlightenment liberalism or republicanism. The Bible, he reported, accounted for approximately one-third of the citations in the literature he surveyed. The book of Deuteronomy alone is the most frequently cited work, followed by Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws. In fact, Deuteronomy is referenced nearly twice as often as Locke’s writings, and the Apostle Paul is mentioned about as frequently as Montesquieu.

Many in the founding generation–98% or more of whom were affiliated with Protestant Christianity–regarded the Bible as indispensable to their political experiment in self-government. They valued the Bible not only for its rich literary qualities but also for its insights into human nature, civic virtue, social order, political authority and other concepts essential to the establishment of a political society. The Bible, many believed, provided instruction on the characteristics of a righteous civil magistrate, conceptions of liberty, and the rights and responsibilities of citizens, including the right of resistance to tyrannical rule. There was broad agreement that the Bible was essential for nurturing the civic virtues that give citizens the capacity for self-government. Many founders also saw in the Bible political and legal models–such as republicanism, separation of powers, federalism, and due process of law–they believed enjoyed divine favor and were worthy of emulation in their polities.

The political discourse of the founding, for one example, is replete with appeals to the Hebrew “republic” as a model for their own political experiment. In an influential 1775 Massachusetts election sermon, Samuel Langdon, the president of Harvard College and later a delegate to New Hampshire’s constitution ratifying convention, opined: “The Jewish government, according to the original constitution which was divinely established, … was a perfect Republic … The civil Polity of Israel is doubtless an excellent general model …; at least some principal laws and orders of it may be copied, to great advantage, in more modern establishments.” Most of what the founders knew about the Hebraic republic they learned from the Bible. These Americans were well aware that ideas like republicanism found expression in traditions apart from the Hebrew model, and, indeed, they studied these traditions both ancient and modern. The republican model found in the Hebrew Scriptures, however, reassured pious Americans that republicanism was a political system favored by God.

Focusing on the Bible’s impact on the political culture of the founding is not intended to discount, much less dismiss, other sources of influence that informed the American political experiment. Rather, I contend that casting a light on the often ignored place of the Bible in late eighteenth-century political thought enriches one’s understanding of the ideas that contributed to the founding project.

Does it matter whether the Bible is studied alongside other intellectual influences on the founding? Yes, because biblical language, themes, and principles pervaded eighteenth-century political thought and action. Accordingly, an awareness of the Bible’s contributions to the founding project increases knowledge of the founders’ political experiment and their systems of civil government and law. A study of how the founding generation read and used the Bible helps Americans understand themselves, their history, and their regime of republican self-government and liberty under law.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/231466804/_/oupbloghistory/feed/2History,Religion,*Featured,hebrew bible,republicanism,Arts & Humanities,eighteenth-century political thought,Founding Fathers religion,American politics culture,king james bible,America,founding fathers,Daniel L. Dreisbach,Deuteronomy,Reading the Bible with the Founding FathersIn the midst of political campaigns, including the last election season, one often hears appeals to the American founding principles and the political visions of the founding fathers.
Which political traditions and thinkers shaped the ideas and aspirations of the American founding? Late eighteenth-century Americans were influenced by diverse perspectives, including British constitutionalism, classical and civic republicanism, and Enlightenment liberalism. Among the works frequently said to have influenced the founders are John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, and William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.
Another, often overlooked or discounted source of influence is the Bible. Its expansive influence on the political culture of the age should not surprise us because the population was overwhelming Protestant, and it informed significant aspects of public culture, including language, letters, education, and law. No book at the time was more accessible or familiar than the English Bible, specifically the King James Bible. And the people were biblically literate.
The discourse of the era amply documents the founders’ many quotations from and allusions to both familiar and obscure biblical texts, confirming that they knew the Bible from cover to cover. Biblical language and themes liberally seasoned their rhetoric. The phrases and cadences of the King James Bible influenced their written and spoken words. Its ideas shaped their habits of mind and informed their political experiment in republican self-government.
The Bible left its mark on their political culture. Following an extensive survey of American political literature from 1760 to 1805, political scientist Donald S. Lutz reported that the Bible was cited more frequently than any European writer or even any European school of thought, such as Enlightenment liberalism or republicanism. The Bible, he reported, accounted for approximately one-third of the citations in the literature he surveyed. The book of Deuteronomy alone is the most frequently cited work, followed by Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws. In fact, Deuteronomy is referenced nearly twice as often as Locke’s writings, and the Apostle Paul is mentioned about as frequently as Montesquieu.
Many in the founding generation–98% or more of whom were affiliated with Protestant Christianity–regarded the Bible as indispensable to their political experiment in self-government. They valued the Bible not only for its rich literary qualities but also for its insights into human nature, civic virtue, social order, political authority and other concepts essential to the establishment of a political society. The Bible, many believed, provided instruction on the characteristics of a righteous civil magistrate, conceptions of liberty, and the rights and responsibilities of citizens, including the right of resistance to tyrannical rule. There was broad agreement that the Bible was essential for nurturing the civic virtues that give citizens the capacity for self-government. Many founders also saw in the Bible political and legal models–such as republicanism, separation of powers, federalism, and due process of law–they believed enjoyed divine favor and were worthy of emulation in their polities. Declaration of Independence by John Trumball. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The political discourse of the founding, for one example, is replete with appeals to the Hebrew “republic” as a model for their own political experiment. In an influential 1775 Massachusetts election sermon, Samuel Langdon, the president of Harvard College and later a delegate to New Hampshire’s constitution ratifying convention, opined: “The Jewish government, according to the original constitution which was divinely established, … was a perfect Republic … The civil Polity of ... In the midst of political campaigns, including the last election season, one often hears appeals to the American founding principles and the political visions of the founding fathers.
Which political traditions and thinkers shaped the ideas and ... http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/231466804/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/11/press-impact-american-revolution/The impact of the press on the American Revolutionhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/GBs3vg_-3Do/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/230864184/_/oupbloghistory/#respondTue, 22 Nov 2016 12:30:32 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=125953Issues of the press seem increasingly relevant in light of the recent U.S. presidential election. At its best, the press can play a critical role in informing, educating, and shaping the public’s thoughts—just as it did at the time of the nation’s founding. In fact, the press was so crucial in those early days that David Ramsay, one of the first historians of the American Revolution, wrote that: “In establishing American independence, the pen and press had merit equal to that of the sword.”

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Issues of the press seem increasingly relevant in light of the recent U.S. presidential election. At its best, the press can play a critical role in informing, educating, and shaping the public’s thoughts—just as it did at the time of the nation’s founding. In fact, the press was so crucial in those early days that David Ramsay, one of the first historians of the American Revolution, wrote that: “In establishing American independence, the pen and press had merit equal to that of the sword.” To illustrate the influential role of the press in the formation of the United States, we’ve pulled out some interesting highlights from Robert G. Parkinson’s article, “Print, the Press, and the American Revolution,” for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History.

Because of the unstable and fragile notions of unity among the thirteen American colonies, print acted as a binding agent that mitigated the chances that the colonies would not support one another when war with Britain broke out in 1775. Stories that appeared in each paper were “exchanged” from other papers in different cities, creating a uniform effect akin to a modern news wire. The exchange system allowed for the same story to appear across North America, and it provided the Revolutionaries with a method to shore up that fragile sense of unity.

Pamphlets became strategic conveyors of ideas during the imperial crisis

Often written by elites under pseudonyms, pamphlets have long been held up by historians as agents of change in and of themselves—that texts like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense or John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, to name two of the most famous, are often seen as actors themselves, driving the resistance movement forward.”

The concept of anonymity transformed during the imperial crisis

Long a key feature of 18th-century print culture, with the republican claims of the patriots, anonymity took on a new significance in print, one that allowed for a broader inclusion of the public, and, by implication, the possibility of greater purchase by the people at large. As a rule, contributors to the newspapers shielded themselves with pseudonyms, often judiciously employed to cast themselves as public defenders (“Populus,” “Salus Populi,” “Rusticus”) or guardians of ancient liberty and virtue (“Mucius Scaevola,” “Cato,” “Nestor,” “Neoptelemus”). As one literary scholar has suggested, by adopting such identities those “guardians” were then not real, individual inhabitants of Boston or Philadelphia, with particular social interests, but universal promoters of republican liberty. Analysts often point to the destruction of the concept of deference—a staple of 18th-century social structure—as a sign of the Revolution’s radicalness.

Printers mediated several fluid and rapidly changing concepts of both their professions and colonial politics before the Revolution. They were the keepers of very important political secrets.

Publishing loyalist pamphlets could have been dangerous for those who opposed the revolution.

Printers mediated several fluid and rapidly changing concepts of both their professions and colonial politics before the Revolution. They were the keepers of very important political secrets. They alone knew who had submitted a manuscript for publication; only they could pierce the republican fiction of anonymity. Often, this position was precarious. As political pressure increased in the 1760s and 1770s, the impulse to throw off these veils was occasionally very strong. Printers periodically found themselves or their property in harm’s way if they refused to bow to the will of angry demands that they confess.

In 1776, when New York Packet printer Samuel Loudon dared to advertise the publication of a pamphlet that answered Tom Paine’s Common Sense and called the “scheme of Independence ruinous and delusive,” the Mechanics Committee, a radical patriot group created in 1774 out of the Sons of Liberty, summoned the printer to explain his behavior and reveal the author’s identity. Loudon refused to tell the committee the Anglican rector of Trinity Church, Charles Inglis, had written the pamphlet, so six members of the committee went to his shop and, in Loudon’s words, “nailed and sealed up the printed sheets in boxes, except a few which were drying in an empty house, which they locked, and took the key with them.” They warned Loudon to stop publishing the pamphlet, or else his “personal safety might be endangered.”

(Loyalists) Mein and Fleeming sought to embarrass the Sons of Liberty … by revealing the caprice and self-interest that they thought really actuated the non-importation boycott the Sons had organized to resist the Townshend Duties. The Chronicle featured fifty-five lists of shipping manifests revealing the names of merchants who broke the non-importation agreement, including many who had actually signed the boycott. In response it was many upset Bostonians who embraced vigilantism this time. Mein and Fleeming had published the lists to suggest the boycott was really an effort to eliminate business competition on the part of merchants sympathetic to the Sons. Now they had to stuff pistols in their pockets to walk the streets of Boston. In October the Boston town meeting condemned Mein as an enemy of his country, and a few days later a large crowd confronted the offending printers on King Street, producing a scuffle that left Mein bruised, Fleeming’s pistol empty, and a few dozen angry Bostonians facing British bayonets. Mein at first took shelter in the guardhouse, but, when Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson did not offer vigorous support, the truculent printer departed for England.

As printers increasingly gave space to contributors who claimed they were unmasking corruption or conspiracy, they aided in the disintegration of established concepts of what kept a press “free.”

The most impassioned publications of the 1760s and 1770s—Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, the chronicle of soldiers’ abuses known as the “Journal of Occurrences,” Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre, and Thomas Hutchinson’s private letters—all centered on revealing or dramatizing the government’s true aims of stripping American colonists of their liberties. There were not two sides to “truth.” Either behind pseudonyms or not, the patriot writers or artists who brought these plots to light claimed they were heroic servants of the people, informants seeking to protect an unwitting public from tyranny’s stealthy advance. This was not a debate. So framed, it was also a difficult position to counter. At the same time, the appearance of each of these “exposés” also represented a choice by the printers themselves. By giving space to the “truth”—and, by extension, to the protection of the people’s rights—they took a side that changed the older values of press freedom forever. A free or open press, they decided, did not have to allow equal space for opposing viewpoints that they characterized as endorsing lies and tyranny.

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/230864184/_/oupbloghistory/feed/0History,freedom of the press,*Featured,Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History,american colonies,Samuel Loudon,Media,Boston Massacre,pamphlets,Thomas Hutchinson,American Revolution,pseudonyms,America,Journal of Occurrences,Online products,newspapers,printers,thomas paine,common sense,Sons of LibertyIssues of the press seem increasingly relevant in light of the recent U.S. presidential election. At its best, the press can play a critical role in informing, educating, and shaping the public’s thoughts—just as it did at the time of the nation’s founding. In fact, the press was so crucial in those early days that David Ramsay, one of the first historians of the American Revolution, wrote that: “In establishing American independence, the pen and press had merit equal to that of the sword.” To illustrate the influential role of the press in the formation of the United States, we’ve pulled out some interesting highlights from Robert G. Parkinson’s article, “Print, the Press, and the American Revolution,” for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History.
Because of the unstable and fragile notions of unity among the thirteen American colonies, print acted as a binding agent that mitigated the chances that the colonies would not support one another when war with Britain broke out in 1775. Stories that appeared in each paper were “exchanged” from other papers in different cities, creating a uniform effect akin to a modern news wire. The exchange system allowed for the same story to appear across North America, and it provided the Revolutionaries with a method to shore up that fragile sense of unity.
Pamphlets became strategic conveyors of ideas during the imperial crisis
Often written by elites under pseudonyms, pamphlets have long been held up by historians as agents of change in and of themselves—that texts like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense or John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, to name two of the most famous, are often seen as actors themselves, driving the resistance movement forward.”
The concept of anonymity transformed during the imperial crisis
Long a key feature of 18th-century print culture, with the republican claims of the patriots, anonymity took on a new significance in print, one that allowed for a broader inclusion of the public, and, by implication, the possibility of greater purchase by the people at large. As a rule, contributors to the newspapers shielded themselves with pseudonyms, often judiciously employed to cast themselves as public defenders (“Populus,” “Salus Populi,” “Rusticus”) or guardians of ancient liberty and virtue (“Mucius Scaevola,” “Cato,” “Nestor,” “Neoptelemus”). As one literary scholar has suggested, by adopting such identities those “guardians” were then not real, individual inhabitants of Boston or Philadelphia, with particular social interests, but universal promoters of republican liberty. Analysts often point to the destruction of the concept of deference—a staple of 18th-century social structure—as a sign of the Revolution’s radicalness. Printers mediated several fluid and rapidly changing concepts of both their professions and colonial politics before the Revolution. They were the keepers of very important political secrets.
Publishing loyalist pamphlets could have been dangerous for those who opposed the revolution.
Printers mediated several fluid and rapidly changing concepts of both their professions and colonial politics before the Revolution. They were the keepers of very important political secrets. They alone knew who had submitted a manuscript for publication; only they could pierce the republican fiction of anonymity. Often, this position was precarious. As political pressure increased in the 1760s and 1770s, the impulse to throw off these veils was occasionally very strong. Printers periodically found themselves or their property in harm’s way if they refused to bow to the will of angry demands that they confess.
In 1776, when New York Packet printer Samuel Loudon ... Issues of the press seem increasingly relevant in light of the recent U.S. presidential election. At its best, the press can play a critical role in informing, educating, and shaping the public’s thoughts—just as it did at the time of ... http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/230864184/_/oupbloghistory/http://blog.oup.com/2016/11/voltaire-love-letters/Voltaire’s love lettershttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OUPblogHistory/~3/ZkZyO365nmE/
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/230224666/_/oupbloghistory/#commentsMon, 21 Nov 2016 17:30:59 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=125165Voltaire had numerous passionate affairs, and engaged in an enormous amount of private correspondence with his lovers, much of which has been kept for posterity. Providing a fascinating insight into Voltaire’s inner-most emotions, his letters give a glimpse of his friendships, sorrows, joys, and passionate desires…

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François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, was born on 21 November 1694. Famed as a great Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher, Voltaire argued for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and most controversially at the time, the separation of church and state. Whilst he is best known for his satirical novella Candide (1759) and the Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764) – both espousing his views on society, Christianity, and morality – Voltaire’s private life is not as widely acknowledged.

The great author and philosopher was no stranger to scandal (both in the political, and personal realms) and was imprisoned on multiple occasions. Voltaire had numerous passionate affairs, most notably with Catherine Olympe Du Noyer (a French Protestant refugee known as ‘Pimpette’), Émilie du Châtelet (a married mother of three who was twelve years his junior), and Marie Louise Mignot (Voltaire’s niece). He engaged in an enormous amount of private correspondence with his lovers, much of which has been kept for posterity. Providing a fascinating insight into Voltaire’s inner-most emotions, his letters give a glimpse of his friendships, sorrows, joys and passionate desires…

In 1713, Voltaire’s father obtained a prestigious job for his son, as the secretary to the new French ambassador in the Netherlands. Whilst living in The Hague however, Voltaire fell in love with ‘Pimpette’ (a French Protestant refugee) – an outrageous union for the time. Their affair was discovered by the ambassador, and Voltaire was forced to return to France before the year was up. On 28th November 1713, he wrote the following desperate plea:

I am a prisoner here in the name of the King, but they can only take away my life and not my love for you. Yes, my adorable mistress, I will see you this evening even if it means losing my head on the scaffold. […]No, nothing can part me from you. Our love is based on virtue, it will last as long as our lives. Order the bootmaker to fetch a carriage—but no, I don’t want you to trust him. Be ready at four o’clock, I will wait for you near your street. Good-bye, there is nothing I would not risk for you, you deserve much more. Good-bye, my dear heart.

Despite the odds, the relationship continued for the next couple of years, with Voltaire still professing his love in February of 1715:

My dear Pimpette: Every post you miss writing to me makes me imagine that you have not received my letters, for I cannot believe that absence can have an effect on you which it never can have on me, and as I shall certainly love you for ever, I try to convince myself that you still love me.

In 1726 Voltaire was exiled to England, after an argument with a fellow nobleman who taunted the young writer on his nom de plume. Living in England, he was inspired by the contrast between Britain’s constitutional monarchy and French absolutism. After two and a half years in exile Voltaire returned to France, and in 1733 published a selection of essays on the superiority of the British political system. On translation into French they caused a massive scandal, and to avoid arrest Voltaire took refuge with Émilie du Châtelet, at her husband’s château. This was the start of an affair which lasted the next sixteen years. On their living situation, he jestingly noted:

She puts windows where I have put doors: she alters staircases into fireplaces, and fireplaces into staircases: she has limes planted where I had settled on elms: she has changed what I had made a vegetable plot into a flower garden. Indoors, she has done the work of a good fairy. Rags are bewitched into tapestry: she has found out the secret of furnishing Cirey out of nothing.

Émilie du Châtelet died after a complicated childbirth, in September of 1749, leaving Voltaire heartbroken. A philosopher, scientist and author in her own right, he wrote of her legacy:

A woman who translated Virgil, who translated and simplified Newton, and yet was perfectly unassuming in conversation and manner: a woman who never spoke ill of anyone and never uttered a lie: a constant and fearless friend — in a word, a great man, whom other women only thought of in connection with diamonds and dancing: for such a woman as this you cannot prevent my grieving all my life.

In spite of his attachment to the Marquise of Châtelet, in 1744 Voltaire had formed a new romantic relationship — with his niece, Marie Louise Mignot. There is much debate as to the nature of their association, and in a letter from 1747/8 he wrote:

How is my beloved? I have not yet seen her; but I am afire to see her every day, every hour.

Voltaire left behind a wealth of correspondence with Mignot, even sharing his intense grief at Châtelet’s death:

My dear, I have just lost one who was my friend for twenty years. You know that for a long time Madame Du Châtelet had no longer been a woman to me, and I am confident that you share my cruel sorrow. To have seen her die, and in such circumstances! And for such a reason! It is frightful.

Later in life, it is thought that Voltaire and Mignot co-habited platonically – and remained together until Voltaire’s death in 1778. Two weeks before his death, he wrote to the Baroness d’Argental poetically concluding:

I am ill, I suffer from head to toe. Only my heart is sound, and that is good for nothing.

A source of un-ending interest, Voltaire’s correspondence covers everything from personal and political events, to philosophy, science, and deepest sentiment. Offering a window into his and his companions’ milieu, they remain incredibly pertinent and moving over three centuries later. Born on this day in 1694 — a Happy Birthday to Voltaire, a man of love and letters!

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]]>http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/230224666/_/oupbloghistory/feed/2History,Religion,French,*Featured,romance,François-Marie Arouet,voltaire,love,Love Letter,Pimpette,Philosophy,Émilie du Châtelet,France,Arts & Humanities,correspondence,Europe,letter writing,aristocracy,desire,affair,Candide,Electronic Enlightenment,Online products,Dictionnaire philosophique,enlightenment,LiteratureFrançois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, was born on 21 November 1694. Famed as a great Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher, Voltaire argued for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and most controversially at the time, the separation of church and state. Whilst he is best known for his satirical novella Candide (1759) and the Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764) – both espousing his views on society, Christianity, and morality – Voltaire’s private life is not as widely acknowledged.
The great author and philosopher was no stranger to scandal (both in the political, and personal realms) and was imprisoned on multiple occasions. Voltaire had numerous passionate affairs, most notably with Catherine Olympe Du Noyer (a French Protestant refugee known as 'Pimpette'), Émilie du Châtelet (a married mother of three who was twelve years his junior), and Marie Louise Mignot (Voltaire’s niece). He engaged in an enormous amount of private correspondence with his lovers, much of which has been kept for posterity. Providing a fascinating insight into Voltaire’s inner-most emotions, his letters give a glimpse of his friendships, sorrows, joys and passionate desires…
In 1713, Voltaire’s father obtained a prestigious job for his son, as the secretary to the new French ambassador in the Netherlands. Whilst living in The Hague however, Voltaire fell in love with ‘Pimpette’ (a French Protestant refugee) – an outrageous union for the time. Their affair was discovered by the ambassador, and Voltaire was forced to return to France before the year was up. On 28th November 1713, he wrote the following desperate plea:
I am a prisoner here in the name of the King, but they can only take away my life and not my love for you. Yes, my adorable mistress, I will see you this evening even if it means losing my head on the scaffold. […]No, nothing can part me from you. Our love is based on virtue, it will last as long as our lives. Order the bootmaker to fetch a carriage—but no, I don't want you to trust him. Be ready at four o'clock, I will wait for you near your street. Good-bye, there is nothing I would not risk for you, you deserve much more. Good-bye, my dear heart. Image Credit: 'Old Letters' by Jarmoluk, CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.
Despite the odds, the relationship continued for the next couple of years, with Voltaire still professing his love in February of 1715:
My dear Pimpette: Every post you miss writing to me makes me imagine that you have not received my letters, for I cannot believe that absence can have an effect on you which it never can have on me, and as I shall certainly love you for ever, I try to convince myself that you still love me.
In 1726 Voltaire was exiled to England, after an argument with a fellow nobleman who taunted the young writer on his nom de plume. Living in England, he was inspired by the contrast between Britain’s constitutional monarchy and French absolutism. After two and a half years in exile Voltaire returned to France, and in 1733 published a selection of essays on the superiority of the British political system. On translation into French they caused a massive scandal, and to avoid arrest Voltaire took refuge with Émilie du Châtelet, at her husband's château. This was the start of an affair which lasted the next sixteen years. On their living situation, he jestingly noted:
She puts windows where I have put doors: she alters staircases into fireplaces, and fireplaces into staircases: she has limes planted where I had settled on elms: she has changed what I had made a vegetable plot into a flower garden. Indoors, she has done the work of a good fairy. Rags are bewitched into tapestry: she has found out the secret of furnishing Cirey out of nothing.
Émilie du Châtelet died after a complicated childbirth, in September of 1749, leaving ... François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, was born on 21 November 1694. Famed as a great Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher, Voltaire argued for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and most controversially at the ... http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/230224666/_/oupbloghistory/